Birdcage
by Blaise
Summary: When Nightingale disappears, Peter tries to find out what happened to him. But with the London Olympics opening in a few days and a string of magical crimes across the city, he can't afford to let any more major tourist attractions blow up either.


It would have been a lot better, I thought afterwards, if Nightingale had caught me and Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina fucking on one of the lab tables. More embarrassing, yes, more painful, no. But one of my rules for living, and I've learned it the hard way, is _never lie down with a woman who's more magical than you are_. Plus there's the whole thing where she's about sixty years older than me, even if she doesn't look it, and she's not my type. So we weren't fucking.

We were doing magic. And it was my fault.

I'd kind of got used to having Varvara in the Folly, especially after she gave me some help with a really fiendish bit of Tacitus that Nightingale had set me. And she'd been in an unusually talkative mood over lunch, probably because Nightingale was working on something in the library and hadn't shown up. Molly had frowned at me as if this was my fault, and then dished up a plate of something Jamie Oliver-ish involving asparagus and carried it reverently away to find him. So Varvara and me were chatting, and after a while I decided to go for it and asked, "Will you show me how to do your freezing death ray?"

"My what?"

"You know. The freezing death ray spell."

"Ah." She looked amused. "I don't think that's a good idea, Peter."

"Come on," I said. "Once Nightingale fits you with his tracker bracelet, I won't have a chance to learn it, and it looks really cool."

She held out for a while, but she'd never had children, and I'd had a lot of practice wheedling things out of my mum. So in the end we trooped down to the lab after lunch, and Varvara looked around.

"How do you want me to demonstrate?"

I found some spare apples and put one on a bench, then thought for a minute, spread out some plastic sheeting on the bench, and put the apple on that. "Do it to this," I said.

Varvara smiled a little, looked at the apple and flung out her hand. The apple exploded in a shower of icy pulp. I frowned, trying to capture the _forma_ in my head. "Again," I said. "Is there a word?"

"It's a combat spell," she told me. "No words. Just the image. I'll show you again."

I went to get another apple and put it on top of the Apple McFlurry coating the plastic sheet. Varvara looked at the apple, and I could feel the _forma_ more clearly in her mind.

Then she suddenly dropped her hand and whirled around. "What-" I started to say. I didn't hear the door open, nor did I see him come in, but suddenly Nightingale was in the lab, striding forwards. What felt like a giant, implacable hand pressed me back and back, until I was up against the wall on one side. Varvara was being pushed the other direction much more quickly, and slammed into the far wall with her feet two inches off the floor. Then Nightingale was between us, facing her.

I realised I'd never really seen Nightingale angry before. And I couldn't move a muscle.

"What are you doing with my apprentice?" he said. His voice was oddly quiet, almost calm, but I recognised the stance he had taken, the same one as he has in the firing range. Molly was there as well, standing in Nightingale's blind spot, and her teeth were visible.

"I meant him no harm," Varvara said. Her words were calm too, but her voice was shaken, more so than after Nightingale had defeated her in a wizard's battle.

There was a low disbelieving hiss from Molly. Nightingale said to her, without taking his eyes off Varvara, "You didn't see this coming?" and she subsided.

"I asked her to show me the spell," I said, but none of them noticed. A moment later I realised that whatever spell Nightingale had used to pin me to the wall was blocking outgoing sound as well.

"You are forbidden to perform magic within the Folly, or anywhere else either," Nightingale said. "And you are not to communicate with my apprentice without my knowledge. Is that understood?"

"Yes," Varvara said rapidly.

Nightingale flicked his fingers, and she staggered forwards. Molly moved, and Varvara flinched. Nightingale didn't have to point to the door. Varvara hurried out, not looking at me, shadowed by Molly. The door closed behind them, and Nightingale turned.

"I asked her," I said again, wondering if I was allowed to speak now. "I asked her to show me the spell, sir. She wasn't trying to hurt me."

Nightingale released me from the wall and walked slowly towards me. "You are my apprentice," he said. "You have taken an oath. Seeking magical instruction from another - and from our enemy - is a violation of that oath." He looked his full one hundred and thirteen years for a minute, in his eyes, and I knew why.

"I didn't know that," I protested. "And it's not-I know you're my teacher, sir. I just wanted to see that spell. I thought it looked useful."

Nightingale continued to gaze at me with ancient eyes, and I tried to look back at him. I'm not betraying you, I wanted to say, I wouldn't do that. Then he sighed and half-sat on the corner of a lab bench.

"I teach you the spells I do, in the order I do, because this is the way to build up your strength as a magician," he said. "Adding random, unknown, dangerous spells to your repertoire could cause you significant harm. Varvara should know this, even if you don't. I told you before what the fatality rate was amongst the soldiers training to become Night Witches. You must not perform any spells except for those I teach you myself. You're already sloppy and inaccurate enough with your spells and your innovations you seem to think I don't know about. Varvara is not experienced enough to teach you, and her own spellwork is crude and unpredictable. If you wish to achieve control, you cannot imitate her."

Crude and unpredictable weren't words I would have used to describe Varvara's spells, but then, I'd seen Nightingale rip a building in half and still make sure not a single brick landed on him, or Lesley and me and our prisoners.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly. "I just wanted to know the spell."

"Your curiosity is going to get you killed," he said, but he didn't sound angry. It might have been better if he had. Instead, he sounded sad, like he was anticipating my death and already grieving for it.

"I'm sorry," I repeated.

Nightingale just shook his head and walked out of the lab. I didn't see him again for the rest of the day.

* * *

The next morning I was early in the library. I hadn't been sleeping that well, even with extra Latin to bore me to tears. But I was finally figuring out how the subjunctive is supposed to work, and I had two sheets of paper full of translated sentences Nightingale had asked for, plus some extra. But Nightingale didn't show up. I waited, and waited, and then got up and went to look around. He hadn't been at breakfast, and neither had Varvara. I finally found Molly in the reading room, dusting. She gave me a hostile look that clearly said_ you upset him._

"Where is he?" I asked.

Molly looked at the telephone.

"You had a call?" I hadn't heard anything ring. "Do you know who it was?"

Molly's blankness was answer enough. A case, I supposed, and one that was urgent enough to take Nightingale out on his own. Or else I was being kept out of the loop on purpose.

I went back to the lab and ran through all the _formae_ we had been going to do that day, putting every ounce of effort into precision and control. Then I headed to the firing range and shot the hell out of a target for half an hour, and then it was back upstairs to tackle the next batch of paperwork. Nightingale hadn't returned by lunchtime. I settled down for the afternoon reading all the briefings about policing the Olympics. With the opening ceremony on Friday, the city was in an Olympic-sized uproar and while it hadn't impinged on the Folly yet, a prudent copper reads his briefing materials in advance. And it wasn't like I had anything else to do. Or anyone to talk to.

At supper, Varvara emerged. She was wearing a silver bracelet on her left wrist, which explained all the clanging I'd heard from the forge yesterday afternoon, and she sat at a separate table from me and didn't look at me. Molly stayed in the room with us the entire time, and escorted Varvara back upstairs afterwards. Nightingale did not arrive.

I headed out to the tech cave. The Jag was gone from its usual spot in the garage, I noticed. Optimistically, I tried Nightingale's mobile, but was sent straight to voicemail. He doesn't really see why he should switch it on unless he wants to make a call. I've shown him six times how to check his voicemail, so I left a message on the offchance that he would remember both that it existed and how it worked, and then logged in to HOLMES. There wasn't anything new for us there, and there wasn't anything in my email either, nor Nightingale's. I'd set Nightingale up with an email address recently, but since he seemed to think I should check it for him and tell him when anything important arrives, it didn't actually save me any work.

I watched a rerun of Battlestar Galactica and went to bed feeling frustrated, and dreamed about Latin verbs and freezing fireballs.

Molly was visibly worried when I arrived at breakfast the next morning, pacing about and dusting obsessively. Nightingale wasn't there.

"Where is he?" I asked her.

She gave her head a short sharp shake.

"He wasn't home at all last night?"

Another shake.

"No messages, nothing?"

Molly's look plainly said _would I be worrying if there were any?_

"He wasn't that pissed off with me. Was he?"

Molly gave a little shrug that said, _you royally fucked up._

"Yeah, but. I mean, what if-"

Molly ran her polishing cloth over the top of the bust of Caesar Augustus a little frantically.

What if indeed.

Any police service takes the disappearance of an officer extremely seriously, and I'd studied all the proper procedures. The trouble was, they all started with notifying the missing officer's line manager. And I had no idea who Nightingale's line manager was, or if he even had any superior officers apart from the Home Secretary and the Commissioner. And it wasn't as if I had either of them on my speed-dial. Lady Ty did, but I wasn't about to go telling her that Nightingale had disappeared. But I couldn't find Nightingale on my own.

I took out my phone, hesitated over the numbers for a minutes, and called DI Stephanopoulos.

She answered on the first ring. "Peter," she said suspiciously. "Please tell me that you don't go in for ESP or any crap like that."

"Um, no," I said. "We did some tests," I added, remembering going through them with Lesley. It wasn't really a happy memory any more. "But I don't think it's possible. Why?"

"I was about to call you. Had the phone in my hand. There's something that smells wrong about a new case. Have you heard about it?"

"Is Nightingale on it already?" I asked hopefully.

"No. But I'd like to talk to him about it."

"Yeah. Well. There's a problem with that, boss. Nightingale's disappeared."

There was a moment of silence as Stephanopoulos processed that. "When was he last seen?" she asked briskly.

"Around breakfast yesterday. Is that right, Molly? When he got the call?"

She nodded.

"And you only notice this now? I thought he lived there. I thought you both did."

"It's a big place. And he was pissed off with me," I added before I could stop myself. "I thought he was out on a case and didn't want me in on it, but he didn't come back last night. His car's gone. Should be pretty easy to track that."

"Yeah. Right. I'll get on it. You say there was a call? Trace that, find out who and when and anything else about that, and I'll start hunting for that fancy Jag of his. Do you have any," she said the word with great care and deliberation, "_magic_ that you can use to trace him?"

"No."

"What exactly is this shit good for anyway?" she asked. I often ask myself the same question, but I said nothing. "All right," she continued. "Get on that call, take a look at his recent papers, see what you can put together about where he might have been going. And I still want you on this other business too. I'll get a team started on locating Nightingale, but I'm out at the recycling centre near the old Battersea power station with an interesting body that reminds me of you, so get your skates on and come take a look."

"Okay," I said. "I'll be over as soon as I can."

Identifying the person who'd called Nightingale yesterday morning wasn't difficult. The Folly doesn't get a lot of telephone calls - not even the call centres of Bangalore have our number, so we never get people wanting to refund us Payment Protection Insurance or install loft insulation or solar panels or give us suspiciously detailed instructions of how to rid our Windows computers of viruses. There's a trace on our line at the exchange, and all I had to do was get the information out of the unexpectedly helpful Geordie woman who took my call.

Nightingale's call had lasted two minutes and sixteen seconds and had come from a payphone in Charing Cross station. Which meant I wasn't going to get a nice name, address and credit card details from their phone provider. Fortunately, Big Brother is getting a lot better at keeping an eye on people, and the big train stations in London have more CCTV cameras per square metre than anywhere else. I might not be able to get a name, but I would have no trouble getting a face, and that would be a start.

I sent in the request for the footage, and headed down to the Folly proper to get my things before going out to Battersea. Varvara was in the atrium, silver bracelet visible on her wrist. She looked up at me warily.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" she said.

I looked at her. "Stay here and don't cause any trouble. Any more trouble."

"I wouldn't worry too much about the Nightingale if I were you," she said. "I would be very surprised if there is any power in London that can stop him going wherever he wants, whenever he wants."

All very well for her to say, but I was remembering a night outside the Royal Opera House, Nightingale shot in the back and on the ground in seconds. Against magic, yeah, I didn't know of much that could stop him, but a hit-and-run could happen to anyone.

* * *

A lot of the unsightly, heavy and very necessary bits of the city's infrastucture are on the river, since transporting freight by water used to be way easier and cheaper than going by road. The old power station at Battersea is a case in point: coal used to be shipped in barges from the mines of south Wales around the coast and up the Thames to power the homes and offices of London. Battersea Power Station is something of a landmark, since it was designed by the same guy who came up with the red telephone box, but it was decommissioned in the 80s and has been standing empty ever since while the local authorities try to figure out what to do with it. It's not like they can turn it into another modern art gallery.

Nowadays some of the power in London is provided not by coal from Wales but by burning the city's own rubbish, and just along the riverbank from the disused power station is a depot where the city's waste is piled into containers and shipped downriver in barges to end up in an incinerator or in landfill. Because recycling is the flavour of the month, there's also a depot open to the general public to take their old fridges and sofas and the wall-to-wall carpets they've ripped out of their newly refurbished Victorian terraces with genuine draughty floorboards, all to be recycled, and that goes downriver in barges too, probably on its way to China to be made into something new and shipped back to England again.

This morning there were no dustbin lorries or white vans, just a selection of Ford Mondeos and Vauxhall Astras and panda cars that indicated a moderate-sized police investigation. I parked my Asbo near the rest of the crowd and followed the noddy suits towards the body.

DI Stephanopoulos saw me coming and gave me a friendly little wave that made me extremely worried. I went over to her. She was standing just outside a forensic tent set up near the edge of the recycling yard, in amidst neatly stacked bales of recycling, plastics and papers and cardboard.

"White man, mid-forties, not yet been identified," Stephanopoulos said briskly, not bothering with any of the niceties or even to commiserate over the evil Olympic traffic restrictions. "We found him stuffed inside a bale of newspapers. The forklift operator spotted the blood as he was loading the bales. He's had his throat torn out by something big, but not a dog. Some kind of animal that forensics don't recognise immediately. That, and how he got inside the bale without leaving a trace on the outside - thanks to you, I know weird when I see it. So go take a look and I hope you'll tell me I'm wrong."

It sounded like a pretty tasty murder investigation. If it hadn't been for Nightingale, I would be enjoying it. As it was, I just grunted, got into my own noddy suit and went into the tent. They'd sliced the bale open fairly neatly to get the body out, but tightly baled newspapers don't come apart without some mess, especially when they're well soaked in blood. I'm getting a bit more experienced at bodies and blood than I really like, and didn't gag too much at the sight. Still, I stood around for a few moments before going over to the body, telling myself it was a good idea to get a sense of the background vestigia here. There was some, all heavy boots and the tang of sweat and salt, men working hard. Pretty normal for a place like this. The forensic tech inside was giving me a funny look, so I held my breath and went over to get up close and personal with another dead body.

From the shoulders down, he was normal, if covered in blood, and above the mouth he was normal too. But it was exactly as Stephanopoulos had said: something had torn his throat out. With teeth.

"We think he was put inside the bale very quickly after he was attacked," the tech volunteered as I went over. "There's a lot of blood soaked into the newspapers. But it's what did for him that I don't get. Big dog, maybe. We'll need a specialist to figure that out." A big dog, I thought, or something weirder. _Were_ there such things as werewolves?

"Was he killed here?" I asked, to put off the moment.

"They're looking around for the precise spot. The bales were moved around a bit before anyone noticed."

I nodded, told myself to get on with it, and leaned over the newspaper bundle and body beside it, and waited for vestigia.

My stomach suddenly churned, but not because of the blood. There was vestigia on the newspapers, and I recognised it like a personal ringtone, 'That's Not My Name'.

Lesley.

I knew her _signare_ almost as well as I knew Nightingale's, and this was her. But changed: stronger, sharper, less joyful. Lesley had used magic to put that body in the bale of newspaper.

The body itself was almost inert, only the slightest trace of the same vestigia on it. Whatever had killed him, it hadn't used magic in a way that left vestigia. Not Lesley.

I don't like hanging around dead bodies at the best of times, so I nodded to the forensic tech, ducked out of the tent again and found Stephanopoulos on her mobile. I must have looked grim, because she cut off her phone conversation and said, "Yeah?"

"It was magic," I said, not bothering with the usual euphemisms we use to protect the rest of the Met from things that make their tiny little minds hurt. "Magic that put him inside that bale. I don't know what killed him."

"And?" Stephanopoulos said when I didn't finish.

"And it was Lesley, okay?" I said, louder than I'd meant to. "Lesley did the magic."

Stephanopoulos folded her arms. "Okay," she said. "You're sure?"

I nodded. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

After a moment, she said, "Okay," again. "That was Guleed on the phone, back at Belgravia," she went on. "They've found the Jag." Despite the news about Lesley, she sounded justly pleased at this fast work. "A patrol out of West Hampstead nick spotted it in Finchley. St Julian's Road, in a residents-only parking bay. I've got some people going over to examine it."

"I need to go," I said at once. "If there was magic used, I'll be able to detect it." And I didn't want to stay here, after what I'd found. Didn't want to think about Lesley using magic to conceal a murder victim. Didn't want to think about what that meant.

"Yeah, yeah," she said. "Anything to get out of doing the real work, I know. I'll want you back on this case later on." But she waved me off towards my Asbo without any further complaint.

* * *

It took me twice as long to get over to Finchley as it should have done, and it was just as well Molly had packed a lunch. It wasn't even anything shocking, just thick expensive ham with mustard. I ate it while sitting in a traffic jam staring resentfully at the empty Olympic-marked lane next to me and wondering whether I could get away with putting the spinner on the Asbo for this. When I finally fought my way through the traffic, I found the Jag parked halfway down the street in a residents-only spot as Guleed had said. It seemed undamaged, and there wasn't even a vestige of unusual vestigia on it. I had the spare keys, but I didn't touch anything inside. That would be for the forensic team to look at, to see if they could find anything that might explain what had happened to Nightingale. But whatever had happened, it hadn't left a magical trace.

But something must have brought Nightingale here. It didn't look like the Jag had been jacked by someone, and besides, there are protections on the Jag. Anyone who tried to hotwire it would find that their problems were only just beginning. So where had Nightingale been going? And why? I stepped back and took a look at the place.

St Julian's Road had been laid out before the motor car was a useful method of transport and was too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic as well as all the cars that the inhabitants wanted to park. So it had been made one-way and the remaining space was divided up into parking bays on both sides. The houses were Victorian terraces, four storeys, many of them divided into flats, with the odd guest house or B&B thrown in for good measure. Apart from the junctions at the ends, it wasn't covered by much in the way of CCTV, so we didn't know which house Nightingale had gone into. Or whether he was still there. I could see what the next step was, so I started at one end of the street and rang the doorbell.

I finally found something at the ninth house. I'd tried eight houses: three had no answer, and the empty parking bays outside them suggested the inhabitants were out at work. The other five had been unhelpful: they hadn't noticed the Jag, they didn't know who had been in it or where they'd gone. And there wasn't any unusual vestigia associated with any of them.

I put my finger on the bell of number 22b, and heard a screech inside, a woman's irritated voice, and footsteps. A short, sturdily built white woman with a baby on her hip opened the door. Behind her a toddler peered around her skinny jeans to look at me.

"Yes?" she said. "I don't buy anything from door-to-door salesmen." Her accent was Eastern European; not Polish, I thought, maybe from the Baltic.

"Police," I said, and showed her my warrant card. "Can I have a word?"

She blinked at the card. I evidently didn't look like a police officer to her.

"It won't take long," I added, and she reluctantly opened the door, then bent down to restrain the toddler who instantly made a bolt for freedom. The baby stared at me in fascination. It had a red and white spotted babygro on, and a stained bib with an owl print, and it bothered me that I couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl. The toddler was clearly a girl, with pierced ears and pink-ribboned hair. The woman closed the door quickly and waved me into the knocked-through living room. I picked my way over the detritus of Megabloks, wooden puzzle pieces and Peppa Pig stuffed animals and waited while she swept a pile of unfolded laundry to one side of the sofa so I could sit down.

Her name was Ruta Jankauskiene, she was Lithuanian and had lived here for three years, and there was no more than the standard background vestigia in her house. I showed her the picture of Nightingale.

"Yeah," she said after a moment's thought. "Yeah. I saw him yesterday. I thought that was a bit weird."

"Tell me what you saw," I said as calmly as I could.

"I was going home, but when I opened the door, Mia took off down the street," she said. "As I was getting her back, I went past them. He-" she pointed at the picture of Nightingale "-he was really drunk. The guy with him was looking after him, getting him into a car. Then they drove off." She'd noticed the car because Mia had tried to run into the street, but she didn't know what colour or make it had been or which way it had gone at the end of the road.

"Did you hear them say anything?"

"Not really. I thought maybe the posh guy, the one in your picture, might have been talking Italian. He was mumbling a lot and it sounded like Italian, but he was really out of it. It's not right, people in that state in the middle of the day. I didn't want Mia to see that. My ex, back home, he used to do that. Lost him his job in the end. It's not right."

Not Italian, I thought. Latin. I didn't know how drunk or drugged you would have to be before you couldn't make a _forma_ in your head, but evidently someone did. I wondered whether Dr Walid would approve if I decided to try some experiments.

She said she didn't know what time it had been, but a bit of prompting got her to tell me that she'd been on her way back from a playgroup which had finished at 11.30, she'd stopped to pick up some milk and baby wipes, it was a ten-minute walk, and they made lunch after she got in, so it must have been around noon. It's amazing how this works with witnesses: they say they don't remember a thing, but for most ordinary members of the public, once they get a few hooks for their memory, they can put together a lot of information. It's not always reliable, but it's a good starting point and if you need to, you stand a chance of getting confirmation on some of the points. She didn't remember noticing the Jag when she'd left the house a little after nine.

"And the other guy, the one who drove the car," I said, "what can you tell me about him?"

"Nothing," she said. "I mean, I didn't notice anything special. I noticed this man, this man here, because he was strange, in his fancy suit and so drunk at that hour of the day. But I don't remember anything particular about the other man."

"Is he one of your neighbours?"

She didn't know for certain, but she thought that if she'd seen him much before she would have remembered that she knew him, if I saw what she meant. I said I did.

"Can you describe anything at all about him? Was he white, black, tall, short...?" But I had a feeling I knew what the answer was going to be.

She surprised me. "Oh, yes, now you ask, he was white, fairly tall, a bit posh-looking," she said. "Not especially old or young. Middle-aged."

I rummaged through my pockets and found some pictures of people involved in all our recent cases, and filtered through them. I took out the two pictures of Lesley, with and without her mask. This person was a man, and that was a relief. And not, it seemed, the Faceless One, given what she remembered about him. I wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. We were on to the Faceless Man, we knew a growing amount about him, so if he had Nightingale we would have a good starting point to find him. But he was freakishly powerful, and I couldn't forget that Nightingale had seemed uncertain of his ability to win a fair fight.

Ruta looked through my pictures and shook her head. "I don't think it's any of them," she said. "Sorry."

The last useful piece of information she had was the house Nightingale and his attacker had been coming out of, three doors down on the opposite side of the street. I thanked her profusely, dodged little Mia's kamikaze jump off the back of the sofa onto my shoulders, and left her my card in case she thought of anything else. Then I went and sat in the Asbo and wrote it all up, and called Stephanopoulos.

"Got a lead, guv," I said. "Lady at number 22 says she saw Nightingale being put in a car and driven away. She says he looked drunk, but I'm thinking drugged. I've got a very vague description of the person who took him."

Stephanopoulos didn't answer for a moment, then said, "Well, isn't this a fucking picnic," she said. "And here was me hoping it would turn out he'd dropped in on a friend and stayed late. I guess we'd better get a sketch artist over there and see if we can get anything better out of her."

"I want to go and look at the house she says they were in," I said. "See if there's any trace. But I thought I'd better call you first."

"All right," she said. "I'll send some backup for you, though with this traffic it'll be a while before they get there. Check in with me again in an hour."

I gave her the address and then went over the road. For a minute I stood on the pavement, eyes half-closed, feeling for vestigia as hard as I could. At first there was nothing. Then I caught the faintest hint of English Breakfast tea, pine and canvas and smoke. Nightingale had been mumbling in Latin as he'd been hauled out by his captor, trying to do a spell, and he had managed to leave a trace.

* * *

I stood very still, fixing the vestigia in my mind, until I could almost hear Nightingale in my head telling me to stop wasting time and get on with it. So I went up the steps to the front door and rang the bell. There was no answer, and I rang again, and a third time. I was just considering trying a fireball on the lock, or waiting till Stephanopoulos's backup showed up with what we call the Big Red Key and which opens doors with extreme prejudice, when I heard footsteps inside and a voice calling, "I'm coming, I'm coming."

The door opened on the chain and an elderly white woman, maybe in her early seventies, peered out at me dubiously. "Yes?" she said.

I showed her my warrant card. "Can I come in? I have a few questions for you."

"Oh," she said, "the police. Yes, of course." She sounded quite pleased, and she pulled back the chain and let me in. The house was the mirror image of Ruta Jankauskiene's, right down to the knocked-through living/dining room she showed me into, but far tidier and smarter. It didn't strike me as old lady-ish, though, lots of Ikea and mirrors and framed concert posters, along with walls of books. I glanced quickly at them as I went in, but it seemed like a ton of English literature and academic books. The elderly lady sat down on a black faux-leather sofa, and I took an Ikea Poang chair.

"Can I have your name, please," I said, "and is this your house?"

"Oh no," she said, "this is my daughter's place." Her name, it turned out, was Margaret Allenby, she lived in East Sussex, but she was staying with her daughter in London for the Olympics. "I have tickets for the water-polo semi-final, and the men's hockey." She gave me a rueful smile. "I've never seen any water-polo in my life, but I wanted to see something."

"And is your daughter here?" I asked.

"She's at work right now. She had yesterday off, but she has lectures today. She's at UCL, she's a lecturer in English Literature."

That explained the bookcases. I noted down the daughter's full name, Annabel Preston, and job.

"Were you here yesterday?" I asked.

"Oh yes. I came up yesterday morning. It took much longer than usual, because of all the preparations for the Olympics, but I got here around eleven." She paused. "Could you explain what the trouble is, please, constable?"

I nodded and reached in my pocket for the photos. Nightingale was on top. "Do you know this man?" I asked, passing her the picture.

"Oh!" she said, barely glancing at the picture. "But that's-" She stopped abruptly.

"You know him?"

"Of course I do. He's my - he's a relative." She did look properly at the picture again, and frowned in concern. "What's happened to him? Is he all right? I was going to see him while I was up here, if he had any spare time. He's very busy these days."

It was my turn to do a double-take. Nightingale was very private about his personal life, and I barely knew anything about his family. There had been no next-of-kin listed on the official records I'd given Stephanopoulos for this investigation.

"How is he related to you?" I asked, and she visibly hesitated, looking again at Nightingale's picture.

"He's my nephew," she said finally, with the exaggerated conviction that you always hear from people who aren't very good liars but are trying to make an effort on a special occasion.

"Your nephew," I echoed. "Really."

Margaret Allenby looked unhappy, and I knew I was right. "Well, that's what I call him," she said carefully. "It's a more distant relationship really, but I've known him all my life." She bit her lip.

"Yes," I said, "I'm sure you have. Tell me, Mrs Allenby, how do you come to have a nephew forty or fifty years older than you are?"

She looked directly at me for the first time. "You know," she said slowly. "Not many people do."

"Could you explain exactly how you are related, please?" I said again, PC Plod style.

"He's my great-uncle," she said. "My grandmother's little brother. He was old when I was younger, and now that I'm old, he's - not. He's different."

"Thank you," I said. I couldn't stop myself from looking at her face, trying to find a family resemblance, but I couldn't see much. Maybe a hint of the shape of the nose, but in this wrinkled old woman it wasn't the same at all. I wondered what Nightingale had looked like before, when he was an old man.

"Has something happened to Uncle Thomas?" she asked. "Please, tell me. I was looking forward to seeing him again. He's a bit of a family legend, you know."

I was having a hard time getting my head around 'Uncle Thomas'. "Have you seen him recently?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Not since, oh, I think it must be almost two years ago. He said then he was looking for an apprentice, but he was having trouble." She gave me a sudden curious look. "Is that you?"

Police work is about collecting information and not giving it out, so I didn't answer, instead indicating that she should continue. She frowned at me, but went on obediently, "Anyway, I haven't seen him for a while, so I was going to call him when I got into London, and invite him to join us here. But I got distracted at Charing Cross, all these changes for the Olympics, and I didn't get around to it."

"Charing Cross," I said. "And you arrived yesterday morning? What time did your train get in?"

"Nine forty-five."

"And what did you do yesterday, precisely?"

"It took about an hour and a half to get over here, on the Tube and the bus. Bella sometimes comes to meet me, but we thought it would be too much bother for her to do that in all this traffic, so I made my own way over. I got here a bit after eleven, and we had tea, and then I felt a bit under the weather, so I had a lie-down until supper." She gave me a rueful smile. "Travel gets a bit harder as you get older. Unless you're Uncle Thomas, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to run in the family."

"And was your daughter here all day?"

"Yes. At least, I suppose so, she might have popped out while I was asleep, but I don't think she did."

"And was anyone else here?"

She shook her head. "No, just the two of us. Please, can you tell me what all this is about?"

I leaned forward, a bit intimidatingly. "We have an eyewitness who saw Inspector Nightingale leaving this house around noon yesterday. Can you explain this?"

"No," she said immediately, with complete conviction. "No. He wasn't here."

"Do you mind if I have a look around?"

"No, go ahead..." she said, and I started off before she could say anything else. I believed her. But that meant... what? Something strange. I walked around the living/dining room, sensing for vestigia and finding nothing. If someone had done magic here on Tuesday, they hadn't left any trace. And I thought I'd be able to find a trace, if it had been Nightingale. I did notice a faint brown stain on the carpet by one of the armchairs.

"What happened here?" I asked, gesturing to it.

Margaret Allenby looked helplessly at it. "I don't know. Looks like spilled tea."

I made a note, and carried on, looking at the bookshelves. English literature, certainly, along with a smattering of less high-brow novels, Jilly Cooper and Agatha Christie. And, on a high shelf behind glass, a complete row of books that could have come straight from the Folly's library. I took out my phone and took a picture of the whole row.

"Those are from the family," said Margaret. "Old books. I asked Uncle Thomas if he wanted them, and he said they were all books he already had copies of and I could keep them if I wanted. But Bella has much more shelf space than I do at home, so she has them here. I don't think she's read any of them. They're all in Latin anyway."

I looked through the rest of the house. The kitchen was clearly well used, with lingering cooking smells from at least two different meals and a pile of unwashed pots in the sink. Margaret volunteered that Bella enjoyed cooking. Upstairs I saw a pair of boxers on the end of the double bed in the master bedroom.

"Does anyone else live here apart from your daughter?" I asked.

"Her boyfriend stays here sometimes, but he has his own place as well." She looked embarrassed by the boxers. "Bella was married, before, but she got a divorce ten years ago. This new fellow is quite nice, I think. He's at the university too."

I looked around a bit further. "He's new?" I said. Coppers are automatically interested in recent changes in people's lives when something suspicious happens around them.

"Well, I say new," said Margaret. "It seems recent to me, but I suppose he's been around for about a year, maybe a year and a half now? He's a biologist of some sort at UCL, and he travels a lot, doing research. He's a nice fellow, though, very polite. Her ex-husband was ..." she paused, delicately "... not the nicest man. I was glad when she finally left him."

I spotted the biology journals on the bedside table. Not the most thrilling bedtime reading, but then, I couldn't talk: I had Tacitus on my bedside table, along with the disturbingly long publication from the Met on policing the Olympics in case the politics of the Emperor Nero failed to bore me to sleep.

Eighteen months seemed a bit long for there to be any connection between the new boyfriend and whatever had happened to Nightingale. I made a note about him and about the ex-husband too, and carried on nosing around until Guleed and her team finally managed to wrestle their way through the traffic. Margaret Allenby looked startled at this confirmation that something serious had happened, but she let Guleed get started with some forensic checks to prove that Nightingale had really been in the house. There didn't seem to be anything more I could do there, so I left them to it.

When I got back to the Folly, Dr Walid was there. He was sitting in the atrium sipping tea abstractedly and filling in some paperwork. When I got in, he jumped up.

"Peter! Do you have any news?"

He sounded truly anxious. I stopped in the doorway, and seriously considered turning around and walking away. Margaret Allenby didn't seem to know Nightingale that well, for all they were related. Walid did. And I didn't like the idea of him being anxious about it. I thought I was doing a good job of not getting involved. I didn't want to change that.

But I had to go over and talk to him. "We've found the Jag," I said. "And I have some more leads to follow up. But I don't know where he is."

Walid sat down again. "There's some tea left," he said. "It's still hot. I don't know what Molly does to the pot, but it stays hot for ages but doesn't stew. What are your leads?"

"Someone seems to have drugged him," I said. "He was seen being put into a car in Finchley and driven away by a man. No ID on the man yet, and identifying the car is going to be tricky because there aren't any traffic cameras nearby and my eyewitness doesn't remember anything about what the car looked like. Nothing unusual, evidently. They abandoned the Jag."

"Drugged," Walid said. "Yes. I've observed that, in the past. It stands to reason, I suppose: any medication that has any kind of sedative effect interferes with the ability to do magic. From what Thomas says, it requires a certain amount of concentration."

"He tried," I said suddenly. "I could feel it, in the road outside. He tried to do a spell. It didn't work."

Walid sat slowly back in his chair, and I thought another man might have started swearing at that. "Find him," he said at last. "Find him, Peter."

Coppers have better things to do than deal with the emotions of friends and family when we're on a case. The trouble is, sometimes we _are_ the friends and family. But I wasn't going to find Nightingale by being his friend, or even his apprentice. If I found him, it would be by noticing things other people missed, putting pieces together and tracking down leads. Being a copper, in other words.

"Do you know anything about what he's been doing lately?" I asked. "He talks to you. Could he have stirred up anything that might provoke this kind of attack?"

"I just open up the dead people," Walid said. "I think you've seen all the cases I've seen, and know more about them. He hasn't indicated any concerns beyond that to me."

He looked at something over my shoulder, and I realised Varvara had crept up on us. Walid knew who she was, of course - as our official doctor, he was responsible for performing a medical check on our prisoners, and once I'd got my head together after Skygarden I'd insisted on it. Walid had managed to get a cell culture out of the deal, to see if he could figure out what she and Nightingale had in common that was making them age backwards, but as far as I knew he hadn't found anything. Varvara had drawn the line at going into the MRI machine, saying that after the Night Witch training she knew exactly what it looked like when you overused magic and she hadn't done it.

"Good evening," Walid said to her, cautiously polite. I wondered how much Varvara had overheard.

"He is missing, then?" she said, straight to the point.

Something tensed in my stomach. Without Nightingale here to hold her, what would she do? I knew I couldn't keep here if she chose to walk away, and the tracker bracelet was nothing but an empty threat. But she already knew enough about what was happening here that I couldn't hide it.

"It seems like it," was all I said.

"It's very hard to hold a practitioner against his will. If he is still alive, he will be back." She gave me a measuring look, to see how I took that. I didn't react. I'd already been around that particular mental loop. If he was alive, he would be able to escape. They couldn't keep him drugged forever. "I'm not going to break this just yet," she said, touching the bracelet with one finger and giving me an edged smile. "The accommodation here is much better than anything I could afford in central London."

Meaning that while she thought there was a chance of Nightingale returning, she would maintain the status quo. But I knew I couldn't rely on that indefinitely.

Walid stayed for dinner, which meant I wasn't sitting on my own, or with just Varvara in silence, and we managed to keep the conversation mostly away from the topic of Nightingale's disappearance, though I couldn't have told you what it was Molly served us. But after he went back home and Molly escorted Varvara upstairs, the Folly felt incredibly empty. I don't know how Nightingale survived in here for so many years on his own.

I went up to the tech cave and turned everything on to see if I could drown out the silence. I found that the CCTV footage from Charing Cross had arrived, so after another futile check of Nightingale's voicemail and email, I settled down to a thrilling time scanning through it looking for our caller, matching up the timestamp on the CCTV footage with the time from the telephone records. I'd barely started when the door to the tech cave swung quietly open. I looked up, and saw Molly in the doorway.

"You want to help? Come on in," I said, and she did, standing stiffly at my shoulder while I scanned through the images and times. When I got the right minute, I stared at a familiar elderly face entering the phonebox. She was wearing the same M&S slacks and nice linen blouse as she had when I'd met her.

"That's her," I said to Molly. "Margaret Allenby. She told me she didn't call Nightingale from the station. She was quite definite about it."

Molly looked over my shoulder at the picture, then at me.

"Do you know her?"

A short nod.

"Do you think she'd hurt Nightingale?"

Headshake.

"Me neither. But I'm seriously wondering about her daughter. I need to track her down. The boyfriend too. But I think it's possible they were all under some kind of glamour. I think she either was compelled to make that call, or forgot about it. Can you wipe someone's memory, like _Obliviate_ in Harry Potter?"

Molly's blank look was just like Nightingale's when I make Harry Potter references.

I looked back at the CCTV footage and played it through for ten minutes before and after the phone call. While Margaret in the image was on the telephone, I stopped suddenly and rewound it frame by frame. Molly looked in too, and made a hissing sound that raised the hair on the back of my neck even though I knew it wasn't directed at me.

It was just in the corner of the image, a person walking through the concourse, facing away from the CCTV camera. It's easier to disguise your face or clothing than your gait or silhouette, they teach us at Hendon, and I knew that back, that stride, even with the jerky effect of the CCTV.

Lesley had been there in Charing Cross station while Margaret Allenby made the call.

* * *

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night, even with the Olympics policing manual to help me. Molly kept pacing around the galleries, I discovered when I went out to the bathroom, and the fact that I couldn't hear her pacing around only made it creepier. I wondered what would happen to her if we didn't find Nightingale. What would happen to me.

I know I must have drifted off in the end, because at 3.22am the bat-phone woke me up with its musical-jackhammer impression right beside my ear. I fumbled for the receiver, dropped it when I forgot that it was attached to the base by a curly wire, lunged awkwardly trying to catch it and managed to fall out of bed. Finally I clutched the damned thing sitting on the floor in my boxers rubbing my knee with my free hand. The pride of the Metropolitan Police, that's me.

"Hello?"

"Is that Peter Grant?" The voice was familiar, but it took me a while to wake my brain up enough to place it.

"Inspector Neblett?" It was almost two years since I'd last heard from him, and while I'd once been a bit too used to being woken up by him shouting my name, I think I must have finally managed to suppress the memories.

"Got something for you," he said. He sounded a bit strained and uncomfortable. "For your special division." I was impressed he managed to mention it at all, even with a euphemism. "A break-in in the City."

"The City?" I said. The City of London is a law unto itself, a city within a city. Apart from confusing foreign tourists over the distinction between the city of London and the City of London, and being a useful dumping ground for all the country's bankers and lawyers, they have their own deeply weird city government, their own mayor, and their own separate police force. We manage to get along, most of the time. I'd overlapped with them a few times during my probation, but since I'd joined the Folly I hadn't been inside the Square Mile.

"Yeah, we were working with them over a couple of related burglaries, two in the City and one in the West End. Something's come up now, and I think you or your boss need to take a look at it."

I think I'd been hoping it would be a lead about Nightingale. Hell, it could have been Nightingale himself, calling to say it was all a big misunderstanding. But no, I get Inspector Neblett and burglars.

"Right now?" I asked before my brain could get online.

"Yes, right now, why d'you think I'm calling you now?"

"Yeah. All right."

He gave me an address, and I promised to be there in twenty minutes.

When I opened the door of my room, dressed and with a bag of kit, Molly was standing there. I jumped about a foot. "Don't _do_ that!"

She looked at me.

"It's not about him. It's another job."

Molly gave me a desolate look and glided away, circling the gallery again and coming to a halt outside Nightingale's door. Toby was sleeping there. I looked at them both and shook my head, then went and got into the Asbo.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to get to where Neblett was waiting for me. It was in the heart of the City, an old Georgian house converted to upmarket offices, mostly small stockbrokers with some lawyers and accountants thrown in for variety. It looked like the only house in a row that had survived the Blitz, because there were regrettable sixties erections, and I use the word advisedly, on either side of it. Parked in the narrow street was a response car, and a probationary PC who looked like she was barely old enough to be in uniform was talking to a member of the public while Neblett looked on with a blank shovel face. I went over.

"There you are," said Neblett, making it sound as though he'd been waiting for hours even though I was earlier than I'd expected. "I want you to take a look at some CCTV footage. Tell me if you think this is, this is _your department's_ business." He eyed me as only a London copper can, as if he was counting up the number of crimes I'd committed in the past ten minutes and seeing if he could get to double figures, but I've been eyeballed by Seawoll and Stephanopoulos on a regular basis since I was Neblett's probationer, and at last he waved me into the foyer of the offices.

There was a security desk just inside the door, and a security guard standing outside while another probationer sat at the desk and downloaded the data. Neblett always delegated that bit to his probationers, since they were much more reliable about finding files and transferring them to USB than he was. This one was tall, skinny, white and hadn't figured out not to bother buying fancy gear yet. He looked at me and did a pretty good impression of the Voice.

"What d'you think you're doing here?"

It wasn't bad for a probie. "PC Peter Grant," I said. "Inspector Neblett asked me to take a look at the CCTV footage."

"Oh," he said. "Oh. Yeah. Okay. It's all here. But it's really weird."

I looked at him until he jumped up and gave me the seat at the computer. "I'll take a look," I said.

"It starts at 02.35," he said, proving he wasn't a complete muppet. It was your standard CCTV on all the entrances shown together on one screen. I skipped to 02.33, just to check, and looked at two minutes of some doors not doing anything. One was the front door, and occasionally a person would walk by, but nobody stopped. But at 02.35.21, every door in the building suddenly swung open. I blinked, rewound it, and watched it again, double-checking the time and date stamps on each individual camera. At precisely the same instant, each door had opened.

"Huh," I said. "That must be tricky to arrange."

"Nobody knows yet if anyone came in or if anything's been taken," the probationer said. "There's some people now checking through everything. But it freaked the security guard out. He went around the doors to take a look. Keep watching."

I watched the doors all standing wide open. The security guard appeared at the front door and shut it, but it sprang open again. Nobody else went near any of the doors. And at 02.39, the feed from each camera dissolved into static.

"I'll need to take a look at the cameras. Or at least one of them," I said. I was pretty sure of what I would find: the same metallic powder and fried circuits I was getting pretty familiar with. This was definitely my case. Another one. "And I want to walk around the building, outside."

The probationer didn't argue, just nodded respectfully. I discovered I liked it, even though it did come from someone who only respected me because he was right at the very bottom of the food chain.

Outside, Inspector Neblett was now talking to another PC, one from the City police from the flash on her uniform. It sounded like a tedious bit of bureaucratic tug of war - nobody wants unsolved burglaries on their crime figures - so I didn't introduce myself. Walking around the building was easier. And I suspected that whatever spell had been done to affect the cameras and the doors, it would have been done somewhere nearby. There's no point doing that sort of thing unless you're planning to go in, after all.

I found it about where you'd expect, in an alley running along the back of the building, nicely away from any CCTV observation. There was a decent amount of vestigia. These were old stone buildings and the spell had been pretty powerful, and precise. I didn't recognise the _signare_, at least not at first. It seemed vaguely chemical, like formaldehyde or something, and there was a lot of strength in it. And there was something else too, like listening to the same jazz classic played by two totally different bands. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate.

Nightingale had said that you could tell from someone's _signare_ who had trained them. I had no idea how you were supposed to do this, but there was something recognisable in our burglar's magical signature, something that reminded me of a mild autumn night on a Soho roof and a blighted spring afternoon on the top of Skygarden. The Faceless One trained this burglar. And I couldn't see the Faceless One allowing his apprentice to run wild and set up his own rival magical criminal enterprise in London. He was a tiger, and London was his patch. That meant that whatever had happened here was part of old Faceless's schemes.

It was even more definitely my case, and I really didn't need it. Not with a murder and Nightingale missing. I made a note to check access to the alley and went back. Neblett and the City PC had evidently reached some kind of polite stalemate and both looked at me as I approached.

"I think he got access through the alley back there," I said. "It's definitely related to my department, and I think it's connected to a, a criminal gang we're investigating."

"Your department?" the City PC said blankly. Not one of the ones who knew about the Folly, then. I looked at Neblett, who said stolidly, "ESC 9."

The City PC decided to pretend she knew what that was, and nodded sagely. "And the other similar burglaries?"

"What was the most recent?" I asked.

Apparently it wasn't far away, and they still had all the CCTV footage at the City nick nearby. So we trooped over there and took a look. This time, I saw, all the cameras had died first and then the doors had opened. Perhaps he'd been in a hurry tonight and got it the wrong way round. I went over to the building to check it out, but I didn't pick up any vestigia there. After ten days I wouldn't have expected it. I've tested that too, and for an average-strength spell (a strong werelight) even stone doesn't retain anything I can detect after five days. Without Lesley, I had talked Nightingale in to helping me with the experiment. I think he'd agreed to try to distract me from losing Lesley, but it had been useful all the same. He could detect trace levels of vestigia up to eight days after the spell in stone. So could Toby, which I think Nightingale found a bit embarrassing.

"What was taken in the other cases?" I asked the City PC.

"Information," she said. "The criminal accessed various computer systems and downloaded files. I have a complete list here-" she rummaged through a heap of papers and came up with one triumphantly. "I expect that's what we'll find at the new scene once the IT person shows up."

Information. I had no idea why the Faceless Man wanted information from proprietary financial computer systems, but I took the paper and asked to be given access to all the cases relating to this string of burglaries. I could see both Neblett and the City officer looking hopeful at the prospect of fobbing off their unsolved burglaries on my department, but they both knew I wasn't senior enough to take official responsibility for them. Yet another thing we needed Nightingale for.

It was almost five in the morning by the time I was done, and the sky was getting light and some of the streetlights were dimming and going out. I trudged sleepily back to my Asbo and found there was someone waiting for me.

"Good morning, Peter."

She was a tall elegant woman in a grey pinstripe suit. Her hair was in a neat business-friendly bob and she had a briefcase and her mother's bright cat-eyes. Back when the City of London was all there was of London, and was surrounded by its own city walls, there was a tributary of the Thames that arose in Finsbury and flowed through the old city. It provided water to the inhabitants, flowing in and out through culverts in the walls, and hence took the name of Walbrook.

"Morning," I said. I'd seen her at Mama Thames's apartment with the other Rivers, but hadn't spoken to her before. But now I could feel the confidence rolling off her, the flashing tickers of the trading floor and the fortunes made and lost in seconds. Walbrook ran through the City, and this was her manor.

"I have a message for you from my mother," she said. Her accent was blandly BBC, every trace of regionalism gone. "She says that our agreements were with the wizard, and if he does not return within a week, we will consider them null and void."

"If he doesn't return," I said, "perhaps there will be new agreements. But we'll find him." I tried to project confidence into those words, but I don't think I was very successful.

"Personally," said Walbrook, "I hope so. I don't like upheaval. It plays havoc with the FTSE. Though you can make money on a falling market as well as a rising one, if you know what you're doing. But my mother's decision will bind us all."

"Do you know where he is?" I tried.

She shook her head, bob swishing. "Locating him," she said, "is not our concern."

"Then if you don't mind, I'd like to get on with it," I said. Then I had a thought. I pulled out the files I'd just collected. "Can I have your opinion on something?"

She looked at the folders. "What is it?"

"What would it mean to be interested in these things?" I gave her the list of files accessed and records taken before she could argue. It's always better that way, not giving them time to think about whether or not they want to help. Walbrook scanned the list before she could stop herself.

"What's this about?" she said.

"A different case." Maybe. "Someone stole all this information. I want to know what he wanted with it."

"Hm." She looked down the list again. "These are all very safe investments he's researching. What we call defensive. When times are hard, these gain in value, and when life is good the price goes down. If I was going to make money on a falling market, I'd buy this sort of thing."

"Isn't that stuff anyone can find out? Why would he need to burgle anyone to get it?"

"Theoretically, yes, it's all based on public information, but there's a lot of assessment and number-crunching and analysis that goes into the reports and files here. Weeks of work for experienced professionals. Much easier to steal than do yourself."

"Okay. But why not just hack into their system? Actually going into the place to steal data seems a bit excessive."

"I'm not a policewoman," said Walbrook, not quite disdainfully. "Maybe they're no good at hacking. You wizards don't go in much for technology, do you?"

It was a good point. You could magic a door open, but you couldn't magic a computer file open. "Thanks," I said, and stifled a yawn. She gave me a cool look.

"Keep looking for the Nightingale," she said.

"My regards to your mother," I replied, and got into the Asbo, thinking. I really wished Nightingale had been more forthcoming about what his 'agreements' were and what they meant, not to mention how they were enforced. Because if we didn't find him soon, it was sounding like I would have to make some of my own.

* * *

I managed to get a couple of hours of kip after I got back, not enough to pass as a full night of sleep, but going out all hours is pretty much the definition of being a copper and I was used to it. Breakfast was laid on even more lavishly than before, as if Molly thought that maybe she could lure Nightingale back home if only she piled up the food high enough. Varvara Sidorovna was still in the breakfast room when I arrived, eating kippers on toast in a leisurely manner.

"Do you know anything about a string of burglaries at financial institutions?" I asked her. I'd taken the files to bed with me and fallen asleep reading them.

Varvara tilted her head. "I know many things. Not all of them are for you." She took another bite. "I haven't eaten like this since 1983."

"Don't mess with me today," I said. "Really, just don't." I helped myself to poached eggs, bacon and toast and plonked the plate down opposite Varvara. "Just answer the question."

Molly glided silently up to my elbow and poured me coffee, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I hadn't seen her come in, and she doesn't normally do that for me. She pours for Nightingale; I get my own. I looked up at her, and she lowered her eyes the way she does with Nightingale.

Molly's sucked pints of my blood and nearly ate me for lunch one time, but nothing she's ever done before freaked me out like this sudden respect. I took a hasty sip of coffee and burned my tongue. I did not want to be Nightingale, did not want to be the one who made the agreements or was responsible for the entire of London's magical safety. But I still heard myself saying, almost exactly the way Nightingale does, "Thank you, Molly."

She glided away again as if she felt reassured. I wished I did.

Varvara had watched this far too knowingly, but when Molly was gone, she said, "I heard something. Not from the boss-your 'Faceless Man'. I heard it on the street, from someone who happened to see one of the burglaries, about two months ago now. A contact of mine. He thought it looked slick and professional."

"Where was the break-in?" I asked as a check.

"Thorndyke House," she said. "James Bailey stockbrokers."

That was the first one on my list. I nodded. "Anything else?"

She shook her head. "I made it my business _not_ to poke my nose in where it wasn't wanted. It's not healthy."

I didn't get anything else out of her, and after breakfast I headed up to the tech cave to start my day, and discovered a message on my voicemail in Stephanopoulos's dulcet tones informing me that my presence was required at Belgravia CID, and then a second, tetchier message to the tune of, where the hell are you, Peter, it's your guv'nor we're busting a gut to find.

I checked the traffic on the special Olympic travel site, which informed me that it would be quicker to crawl on my hands and knees to Belgravia than to attempt to drive or use public transport, and then suggested a route via Bromley. It was a forty-minute walk, so I got my stuff together and headed out.

Even the pavements were congested. Normally you get a chance to think about stuff on a walk, but today I was constantly having to dodge lost tourists, 'helpful' Olympic volunteers in purple and pink trying to give me directions to places I didn't want to go, and many other irritated Londoners. It calmed down a bit when I got onto the Mall, if only because it was wider. I tried to put some of the pieces together. The Faceless Man or his people were breaking into stockbrokers in the City, had murdered a man at a tip in Battersea, and had kidnapped Nightingale in Finchley. There must be some connection between these things, but no matter how I turned them around in my head, I couldn't see it. And then there was Lesley. She had definitely been involved in the murder, and was probably involved in the kidnapping too, and I had no idea what she was trying to do with all this. It was hard to imagine Lesley wanting to hurt or kill Nightingale, but then it was hard to imagine her Tazing me in the back and she'd done that, so what did I know? I glared at the next Olympic volunteer in a way he probably didn't deserve, and then it was time to fight my way through the tourists outside Buckingham Palace.

As soon as I got into CID, I saw a familiar face. DC Carey spotted me a second later, and said with relief to someone out of sight, "Oh, here he is, sir," and I braced.

It was Seawoll. He bore down on me like a military drone locked on an Afghan wedding. "I hear you've mislaid your boss," he said, in tones that suggested that he really wanted to add 'and good riddance' but was restrained by some vestigial decency. "And you've got my Miriam hunting for him all hours. But you couldn't be arsed to show up."

I didn't try to explain about Neblett and that I'd been out on a shout until six in the morning, or mention the Olympic traffic. It wouldn't have helped. Instead I kept my mouth shut and tried to look alert.

"Interview room four," he said after eyeballing me for another minute. "Get on with it."

I didn't scarper, quite, but only because I needed Carey to show me where to go. Stephanopoulos was inside, interviewing a middle-aged white woman who was wearing white designer jeans, a draped black and white top, and long dangly earrings. I made an educated guess that this was Nightingale's great-great-niece, the English lecturer Bella Preston. She had the distracted, slightly panicked look you get on civilians who've been 'helping police with their inquiries' for a few hours. I knocked, and Stephanopoulos waved me in. She didn't rip into me in front of a witness/suspect, but I could see it was hard for her.

"This is PC Grant," she said, and introduced me for the tape recorder too. "He's one of my team on this case." No further explanations about just how closely I was connected, so I did my best professionally distant expression as I said hello.

I didn't feel any vestigia on her, nothing that suggested there had been any magic used on or around her recently. But people, especially live people, don't hold vestigia well. I hadn't felt anything on Margaret Allenby either. So I did a little test of my own. Silently in my head, I shaped a tiny _impello_ and shifted Stephanopoulos's stack of papers half a centimetre to the left. Nightingale had made me practice this for weeks and weeks. Control is the test of a real magician, he'd said. Any fool can use _impello_ to lob a brick, but moving small objects tiny distances was much harder. It was: I'd sweated over it day after day in the lab until I could move a marble an inch and no further without making Nightingale wince at my spellwork. If Bella Preston was a practitioner, she would notice the spell; if not she almost certainly wouldn't.

She didn't blink. I moved the papers back again, and she still didn't notice, though Stephanopoulos twitched and tried not to turn and glare at me.

"I don't understand," Bella was repeating. "I was at home yesterday with my mother all day. Uncle Thomas didn't appear at all."

"Then how do you explain his fingerprints on chair and doorbell and other surfaces in your living-room?"

"I don't know," she said miserably. "I don't know. He wasn't there. I have no idea how it could have happened."

Stephanopoulos tried asking the question six other ways, and Bella carried on with her baffled denial. She was getting upset, and Stephanopoulos knew when to stop. "All right," she said, "let's take a break. I'll send someone along with some tea and biscuits for you." She told the recorder that they were pausing the interview, and we stepped outside.

"What the fuck were you doing with my files?" she demanded.

"Testing to see if she was a practitioner," I said. "You can feel it, when someone casts a spell nearby. But she didn't react at all. I think she could be telling the truth about all this. Someone drugged Nightingale. Maybe they drugged her as well, and her mother too. I don't think they could have used a spell on her, not while Nightingale was there. Maybe afterwards."

"Have I mentioned how much I hate this stuff?" Stephanopoulos said conversationally. "How am I supposed to get a confession out of her if she's been fucking _Obliviated_?"

"We have to find out who drugged them," I said, though I was impressed with the Harry Potter reference. "I want the boyfriend."

"According to her and to the university, he's been away on field research since last Thursday. Back tonight."

"What's he doing?"

"Something about badgers, apparently. Joint research with DEFRA."

"Have you checked that?"

"No, we don't bother checking the alibis of obvious suspects here, Peter, it's not like we're _detectives_ or anything." She gave me a dirty look. "We've spoken to him on the phone, his research partner, his university supervisor and the landlady of the B&B he's staying in, and they all say he's been watching badgers all week. Do you think we should bring the badgers in for questioning too?"

"All right, all right," I said. "Sorry, boss."

Stephanopoulos relented a little and looked back at the interview room. "I still can't get my head around the idea that Nightingale is her great-great-uncle. I thought all those references to World War II were just, like, the history of the institution. Not personal."

"Very personal," I said. "I try not to think about it, except when I can't because he's doing some weird old-fashioned-" I stopped. Thinking about Nightingale was a bad idea. I didn't think about Lesley either, for much the same reason.

Stephanopoulos seemed to understand, because she just grunted and then said, "I've got the manager of the Battersea tip waiting. There's a report from the pathologist about cause of death that I want you to take a look at too, see if it rings any bells in that empty head of yours."

"Sure, boss."

"We've got an ID on the victim now. Pete Winning. Man with a van. I've got people checking his home out, but it seems like he was doing a bit of illicit late-night dumping by the tip, leaving a couple of old kitchen units there from his last job. The CCTV shows him arriving, but then it burns out."

"Yeah," I said. "That's the problem with this stuff."

"I think he's not connected. I think he just walked into something, wrong place wrong time, and it got him killed," she said. "But I don't know what it was he interrupted. I want you to go visit his home and look for whatever it is you look for, and check out his timeline and see if anything pops."

"If it's the place rather than the guy," I said, "then maybe I should go back there."

"The manager's here now," she said. "Start by talking to him, see if anything comes up before you waste time getting across the river and back."

I nodded agreement. A DC I didn't know came up and said, "Boss, there's a call for you from Forensics," and Stephanopoulos turned away with a curt, "And stay out of trouble."

I wanted to. I really did.

The site manager of the Cringle Dock tip - or rather, the Environmental Waste Recycling Transfer Facility, as he carefully reminded me - was sitting patiently in the office. Not an official suspect in an interview room with the tapes going, this was just a friendly chat. I introduced myself, commiserated over the traffic and the weather and the tourists, before settling down to ask questions.

"Do you get a lot of trouble at the site? I mean, generally."

"We've never had anything like this before," he said. It was the third time he'd said it. "I mean, there's always metal thefts. But who doesn't get those these days? The price of scrap is going through the roof. And lots of dumping. I don't know, some people have never heard of CCTV. We normally find them, so long as the CCTV is working, and they get a fine. Oh, and then there's the joker who's been helping himself to the packing peanuts."

"The what?" I said, and he explained that packing peanuts were the little styrofoam pellets that a lot of delicate items were packaged in. "We've had three whole vanloads of them disappear in the past couple of weeks," he said. "God knows why, there's no resale value to speak of. We've got a recycling contract for them, but it's barely worth the paper it's written on. Still, got to hit our targets."

"And do you have any CCTV footage of those thefts?" I asked.

"It's been on the fritz for weeks," he said. "And then it completely packed it in when that poor guy was killed."

"Lots of styrofoam packing pellets," I said. "Thank you, you've been very helpful."

Stephanopoulos had got off the phone in the corridor, and was heading back to Bella Preston's interview room. I stopped her.

"I think he's still alive," I said without preamble. "I think someone's holding him. And I think I know how."

"It's been forty-eight hours," she said, in a slightly less biting tone than normal. "You know the odds."

I did. If someone's been kidnapped and you don't find them or hear anything from the kidnappers within a day or two, most of the time the reason is that they're dead. The odds were not in Nightingale's favour any more.

"Yes, I know, but listen," I said. "Apparently they've had several vanloads of those styrofoam packing peanuts stolen from the tip, and I think there were, you know, other means used. Do you know what you can do with a fuckload of styrofoam?"

Stephanopoulos gave me a long look. "What can you do with a fuckload of styrofoam?" she asked at last, not even bothering to use a sarcastic voice.

"You can insulate against magic. If you built, like, a really big cavity wall and filled the cavity with packing peanuts, and the floor and ceiling as well, and put - someone - inside, I don't think they would be able to do magic." I considered explaining how it worked, but I didn't really know myself. We'd discovered it completely at random one day when I'd had a phone delivered to me in one of those styrofoam-lined boxes to keep it from breaking in the post, and I forgot about it and did a spell with it right there in front of me. But the phone didn't die despite having the battery hooked up. We'd tried it again, and again, and the phone stubbornly survived. I'd wanted to do more investigating and see how much styrofoam you needed and whether I could carry my phone in a magic-insulated case or whether it would make it the size of a small telephone directory. But then Skygarden had happened and I'd got just a bit distracted.

But what would happen if you were locked in that kind of styrofoam cell and you tried to do magic? From what I knew about magic, you somehow drew on the background magic of the world to do your spells-and yes, I do know just how stupid and vague that sounds, but I've got to start somewhere. But if you couldn't draw on that, you'd draw on the magic of your own body and brain, and eventually that... Fuck. That kills you.

If that was what had happened to Nightingale, would he figure it out before he gave himself a stroke or an aneuryism? He'd been around when Lesley and me had been experimenting with the phone and the styrofoam box, but he hadn't really been paying attention, because he never did when we were messing around. When I was messing around, now.

And then I knew how whoever was holding Nightingale had figured this out. Because it had been Lesley and me who had done the experiments.

"Lesley's involved," I said, or tried. It took two goes to get the words out. "Lesley knew this. She's definitely involved in Nightingale's disappearance as well as the murder." I told her about also seeing Lesley on the CCTV footage of Margaret Allenby calling Nightingale - luring him out of the Folly.

Stephanopoulos did not sound convinced by any of it. "Or some other twat lifted the styrofoam," she said. "And she might have just been passing through, I mean, it's Charing Cross. But all right. I'll grant you it's possible. Could be the victim interrupted the theft?"

"No, the timeline's wrong. The last theft was last week. But it seems to me that whoever they are, our ... other ... people have been in and out of the tip for the past month at least. I want to go back there. I think that it's possible Nightingale's being held somewhere nearby."

"Yeah?" Stephanopoulos said. "We've had a pretty thorough search of the area. There's still people out there now looking for more evidence about Pete Winning's murder. If you take a look at the files we've got on that, maybe you can do both at the same time."

She left me in a corner of the office with a stack of paperwork about the murder victim, and a promise to head out to the tip later on. It seemed about as good as I was going to get, so I got on with the reading.

The pathologist's report on Pete Winning was fascinating, if you liked that kind of thing. He'd been killed by having his throat ripped out, which was pretty obvious from what I'd seen. What was harder to understand was just what had ripped his throat out. The jaw, according to Walid and the forensic dentist who'd consulted on the _vagina dentata_ case, did not correspond to any of the common or even uncommon breeds of dangerous dog, or any animal that they could recognise. Walid, who'd examined Molly's teeth once, added that it was nothing like her either. It also wasn't a dragon, which made me blink and reread that paragraph to be sure: apparently Walid had seen a dragon's bite. I added another item to my long, long list of things to ask Nightingale about. Dragons.

The rest of the dossier on him was dull and straightforward: no previous record except for a few speeding tickets, thirty years working as an electrician in Battersea, no connections to magic, to Nightingale, to Lesley, to any of our suspect Little Crocodiles. I was just getting to the end of it when Stephanopoulos came in.

"Peter," she said, and something about her voice made me freeze up. "Peter, I'm sorry. I'm afraid we've found a body."

* * *

"No," I said instantly. "No." I didn't realise I'd spoken out loud until Stephanopoulos, very gently, said, "I'm sorry. It's - he's - turned up in the boot of a car abandoned not far from the tip. One of my DCs just called it in. It's him."

I didn't say anything else for a minute. A body. Nightingale's body, shoved in the boot of a car like an old carpet. I suddenly had a vivid flashback of finding Skye's body in the garden a few months ago.

"I want to go," I heard myself say. "It's my case. And he's my-"

"I'll drive you out there now," said Stephanopoulos, still in that odd gentle voice. "I've just called your pathologist. He's on his way over too. I'm sorry, Peter."

I don't really remember anything of the drive, and I didn't notice the Olympic traffic stupidities. Had he been there that morning, when I'd gone out to investigate Pete Winning's body? Had we missed him? Could we have saved him?

We pulled up a street away from the tip. There were swarms of detectives already around a parked car, a white Ford Mondeo, and the boot was open. It took me three goes to get into my noddy suit. I couldn't seem to coordinate myself properly, and Stephanopoulos finally did it up for me like she was dressing a child. I saw Walid, ghostly in his own noddy suit, standing looking into the boot, and his face was puzzled, as if he was looking at something that didn't make any sense.

I walked slowly over, and all the forensic people moved out of my way. I didn't want to look suddenly, and I turned my face away. Walid put a gloved hand on my arm. "Peter," he said hoarsely.

Something was nagging at me, something I needed to pay attention to. It came to the front of my mind suddenly, a flash of formaldehyde and the Faceless Man's razor edge, the same vestigia I'd felt outside the stockbroker's this morning about a hundred years ago. But it wasn't the dim echo of a spell used here in the past, it was the low mechanical hum of a spell being used right now. I stepped quickly away from Walid.

"Move away," I said. "Everyone get back."

"Peter," began Stephanopoulos gently.

"There's something here. Maybe a device." I thought of the double-bossed demon traps, one to kill the victim, and one to take out the rescue attempt. Was that what this was?

Walid, at least, took me seriously, and began to shoo the rest of the forensics people away, and after a moment Stephanopoulos did the same with her people. She stayed with me, though. "What kind of device?" she asked.

"I don't know. But it's live." I leaned forward and looked into the boot. It was Nightingale, his aristocratic face livid in death, lips purple, his elegant suit rumpled. He would have hated that. But the hum of magic was strong here. All the doors of the car were open. I walked around it, looking in without touching, then went over to where there was a scrubby hedge towards the river and rummaged around until I had a long green stick. I tapped around the car and finally touched Nightingale's body with it, but nothing happened.

Concentrating, I thought it wasn't really very like the demon traps I'd encountered before. It was more like the hum of a dog battery, magical but unmenacing. Could you use a dog battery to power some other spell, to keep it running? How long would it last? I tapped around the car for a second time, and this time I found it. The spare tyre was under the bottom of the boot, beneath Nightingale's body, but when I tapped it with the green stick, I felt a jolt down my arm.

"It's underneath him," I said. "Shit."

"We're not really ready to move the body," said Stephanopoulos.

"I think you have to. The device is underneath him, in with the spare tyre." A demon trap would fit nicely in that space, as would a dog battery.

"How do you defuse it?" she asked.

I had no idea. "I don't even know what it is yet," I said. If it was running a spell, it could be absolutely anything. I didn't know how to tell spells apart by feel, or even if you could tell them apart. "Everyone had better turn off their phones. And any other electronics. Take the batteries out."

Dr Walid came forwards again, with a gurney. There was a standard body bag on it. "I'll help you move him," he said.

We lifted Nightingale's body slowly and carefully. I tried not to look at the way his head lolled backwards as we lifted him, unnatural and unmistakeable. Walid pushed the gurney away, but didn't do up the body bag.

The spell was still humming away. I lifted up the mat inside the boot, very slowly and carefully, and saw the device. Stephanopoulos looked in too. "Is that it?"

"Yeah." It was smaller than the dog batteries from Skygarden, maybe the size of a frying pan, but it was the same design: two circles of metal with odd circular patterns incised in the metal, held together with wood. The Faceless Man had been refining his technology. This time there was no note, not even in Elvish.

I leaned in, closing my eyes and concentrating. It reminded me of Larry the Lark's fortune-telling machine, the same mechanical sense. This battery was powering a spell. But what spell, and how to disconnect it?

Larry the Lark's cage had been burned out when Nightingale had defused a demon trap nearby. Could a powerful spell close by burn this out, and would it blow me up in the process? I couldn't think of anything else to try. But at a distance.

I got everyone to move back to a good twenty metres or more, and double-checked that my phone was off. "What are you doing?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"Shooting it," I said bluntly. I concentrated, mustering the perfect form, the strength and style Nightingale would have wanted, and sent my fiercest and hottest fireball at the dog battery. There was a soft thud, and then a blast of magic made me stagger backwards, bumping into the gurney. Stephanopoulos swore, and there were exclamations from the other detectives and an angry shout from someone who hadn't turned their phone off. I felt the spell unravel and stop, and there was a weird moment of silence.

Then I heard Walid say, clearly, "Shit."

I turned. The gurney was empty. No, not quite empty. I took a closer look and saw a small brown bird engulfed by the body bag, dead. I stared at it.

"That's a nightingale," said Stephanopoulos unexpectedly. "What? One of my exes was into birdwatching," she added at our looks.

"So," Walid slowly, as if he didn't want to ask, "was what we saw before real, or is this real? He felt real."

I leaned in close to the dead bird. It had the lingering vestigia on it that I associate with something that's been exposed to magic, but the hum of the spell was gone. "I think," I said, "I think the bird is real. I think the body was an illusion of some kind. To stop us investigating any further. To stop us looking for him."

"Huh." Stephanopoulos stared at the bird. "It would just make us start looking for the killer," she pointed out "They don't know police very well."

"And would the spell have been sustained once I took the body to the mortuary?" Walid asked.

"Or it's just someone's idea of a nasty practical joke," I said. Which worked, and it fit with what I knew to be the Faceless Man's sense of humour. I wasn't going to be getting the image of Nightingale's body crammed into the boot out of my head in a hurry, especially since I'd been trying not to imagine things like that for the past few days. I had another nasty thought.

Stephanopoulos beat me to it. "They could be around here watching," she said.

"Probably are," I said, and we both looked around. It was an industrial area, high yellow brick walls on both sides peppered with wire gates with security fencing on top, lined with parked cars. I could see the yellow spike of a crane in the direction of the river, and more all around. Stephanopoulos was making notes on security cameras, and there were plenty around the place, keeping an eye on the site. Most of them were probably real, too.

"Don't bother," I said. "If the spell that was making the illusion didn't burn them out, then when I blew it, that'll have killed them all."

"You're not making it easy for me, Peter," she grumbled.

"Further down the street might give you something," I offered. I haven't done anything like a proper analysis of how far away from the source of a spell a computer chip needs to be before it's safe, since it depends on how powerful the spell is and I haven't got anything to measure _that_. I did come up with some units: 1 lumos, the strength of a spell to make a simple werelight for one minute; 1 Nightingale, the strength of a fireball that burns through a Tiger tank. By that scale, I reckon it was at least 15 lumos (or possibly lumoses, Lesley and me argued about what the plural should be) to blow up the illusion spell, but since it's not based on anything other than my vague feeling about how much magic I'm using, it's hard to be sure.

"We'll be checking them all," she said. "Why don't you take a wander around and see if you get anything with your weird spooky sense. And we found the spot the murder was committed, so you can check that out too while you're here."

I took my weird spooky sense for walk around the area, looking in the windows of the parked cars and up at the old brick warehouses. There was plenty of activity around the place, and plenty of places for the Faceless Man or his accomplices to hide without me noticing. I felt a pricking on my spine like when you're being watched, but I could perfectly well have imagined it.

The murder scene was still under investigation, with a little forensic tent over the spot where an alert DC had found the blood. I walked around it and felt a faint echo of the same vestigia I'd felt before. Lesley's spell. There was a line of sight between here and the place where the baled newspapers had been stacked. I imagined the creature or whatever it was, not a dragon, ripping Pete Winning's throat out in front of Lesley's eyes, and her, cool as ever, working out a way to hide the body almost instantly. Accessory after the fact, that made her.

I didn't know what spell she'd used to get it into the bale. Nothing we'd learned from Nightingale, that was certain. But why here? What had Pete Winning interrupted? I turned in a slow circle. It was a patch of rough ground open to the river, great for dumping rubbish. Or bodies. On the water I saw a tug pulling a barge stacked high with rubbish containers heading out to the coast, a passenger ferry, a couple of pleasure cruisers and a narrowboat all moored on the opposite bank along with a smaller rubbish disposal boat with a single container and a little crane, and a middle-aged man in a kayak paddling in the shallows. The Thames is a busy working river, after all, even in these days of airplanes and motorways.

Behind me was the end of the road, with a turning circle wide enough for a medium-sized lorry and wheel-marks in the muddy verges showing where many vehicles had turned around. I wandered about for a bit and went back to the crime scene.

"Do you have anything else?" I asked DC Carey, who was filling in some paperwork outside the tent.

"Footprints leading down to the edge of the river," he said with understandable satisfaction. "Possibly our suspect, or one of our suspects. Heavy footprints, probaby a big man."

"Or carrying something heavy," I said thoughtfully.

"Could be. They're weird, though," Carey went on. "Forensics says they think the guy must have a serious hip problem or something, because his strides are all wrong."

"Or he isn't quite human," I said.

Carey stared at me. "They really weren't joking about you, were they? But do, um, not-quite-humans wear Nikes? Size ten? Because that's what the shoes are."

"Yes," I said.

That obviously wasn't the right response. Carey grimaced. "Seriously? Well, that's not my department. Good luck with it."

A chimera, wearing size ten Nikes, with a teeth that could rip a man's throat out, carrying something heavy from the road to the river. The pieces were coming together, but I didn't like the picture they were making.

"They're going to send us a diver," said Carey, who had evidently reached the same conclusion. "To look for a body in the water."

"Yeah." I turned away and walked down towards the water, extending my senses to their finest pitch. Nightingale had tried to do magic outside the Allenby house when he was being taken away. If he had been taken to his death here, surely he would have tried again. Assuming he wasn't already dead. I stared into the water and wondered whether Mama Thames would know if Nightingale's body had been thrown into her river, and whether she would tell me if she knew.

But if he was dead, then why the fake body? And why the theft of all the packing peanuts? If the river knew the answer, she wasn't telling, so after a minute I walked back up to the road.

I finished my circuit of the area and headed back to the abandoned car. Stephanopoulos cocked her head at me.

"Nothing new," I said, and she shrugged.

"Want a lift back to Belgravia?"

"Actually, I was thinking of going back to Finchley," I said. "There's one more thing I want to check."

Stephanopoulos nodded, distracted. "Just don't do anything stupid," she said, again, and set me up with a lift with a DC I didn't know, a white woman with curly brown hair cropped short who was a few years older than me. We chatted about the Olympics, a bit about the case, but from what she said, she knew the bare minimum about what I did and she liked it that way. I didn't discuss what I was intending to do.

By some miracle the traffic had eased up a bit, and it only took twenty minutes longer than normal to get back to St Julian's Road. I went, not to Bella Preson's house, but to the house of my only useful witness so far. Ruta Jankauskiene did not look best pleased to see me, but the whimpering sleepy-eyed baby she was jiggling impatiently against her shoulder explained that.

"I need to know if you recognise this man. And if he is the person you saw the other day," I asked cautiously.

I'd found a mugshot of Bella's boyfriend, Edward Brooks, in Stephanopoulos's accumulated files. From the looks of it, it was a driving licence picture, stern and frowning and unattractive. I showed it to Ruta, and she shrugged. "I don't remember for sure," she said. "I only really noticed the other man, the drugged one. But it could have been him driving the car. He looks a bit similar. Maybe." She jiggled the baby again and its whimpering turned to howling. "Is that all?"

I thanked her for her time, and crossed that off my list of useful activities. Not a positive identification. But it didn't rule him out either. I left her with the baby and headed on to my next stop.

* * *

University College London is the oldest part of the broader University of London. It's a high-powered academic place with 27 Nobel Prizes to its name, and even if I'd got my projected A-level grades instead of the scores I actually got, I wouldn't have had a chance of being accepted there. The biology faculty is located in the main campus on Gower Street, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from the Folly even in the Olympic mayhem on the streets. The campus was quieter now in the summer holidays than it would have been during term, but there were still plenty of people around. The place is a maze of old and new buildings, and it took me three false turns and two grad students giving conflicting directions before I found the Department of Environmental Science where Edward Brooks had his office, in an unprepossessing Victorian yellow-brick building, plain and clearly not meant to be looked at, but with generous and well-proportioned windows.

I called up on the entryphone inside the lobby and identified myself, and waited. A couple of minutes later, a white man in his early thirties came down the stairs. He was casually dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and his hair was shoulder length and pulled back in a ponytail.

"PC Grant?" he said, extending a hand. "I'm Phil Zabowski." His accent was mid-Atlantic, as if he'd lived in London long enough to wear down the edges of what I thought had once been Texas. "I'm Ed Brooks's research partner. He's not here now, he took the afternoon off and went home. He was working very late last night."

I knew this already, because while Stephanopoulos had an alibi for him, she wasn't about to lose track of a person of interest in this sort of case. And I didn't want to meet Edward Brooks today. I wanted to check out his gaff and talk to his partner.

"Can we go up to your office?" I asked.

Zabowski laughed. "We don't rate an office of our own. We've got a couple of workstations on the third floor."

"The workstations, then," I said, and followed Zabowski up the stairs, trying to get a sense of the place. It felt like a university should, that blend of earnestness and pomposity and young people shovelling abstruse knowledge into their heads by the bucketload. But there was no sense that anyone had done any magic here lately.

The third floor office was like any other open-plan office I've ever seen, but messier: desks piled with papers and folders, lots of two-year-old computers, coffee mugs abandoned everywhere. There was only one other occupant: an Asian woman with red highlights in her hair and an intense look of concentration on her face. She didn't look up when we came in. Zabowski led me to a corner where there were two desks of about average messiness. "This is us," he said.

"So you work closely with Edward Brooks?" I asked.

"For this, yes. But I only really met him a couple of months ago. Before that I was doing bats."

Bats, now badgers - perhaps he was working through the alphabet? "But you were both down in Stroud together? What exactly were you doing?"

"I told all this to the woman on the phone," Zabowski said plaintively. "Do we have to go over it again?"

"If you don't mind, sir."

The 'sir' did the trick, and he said, "Oh, it's not a problem. This is part of the work on vaccinating badgers against TB - you've heard about that? Well, we're assessing the results of the first field trials, trapping badgers in specific locations and checking their TB status, and also assessing issues in the surrounding ecosystem. You only have to change a few things, you know, before you start getting unforseen consequences, and before this program goes nationwide we need to be sure it works properly and it's not harmful. So that's what we were doing."

"And you were both staying at the same B&B?"

"Yeah. The travel budget isn't exactly generous, but this wasn't bad. The lady who runs it made some seriously good English breakfasts." He smiled reminiscently. I thought of Molly's spreads.

"And during that week, can you think of anything unusual? Anything... weird that happened?" It's hard to find the right way to ask this question. You can't go up and ask members of the public whether they saw anything that might have been magical in origin, after all. Nightingale is good at it, he can gently lead a witness to disclose all kinds of magical shenanigans without ever making them think there's anything strange about it. Years of practice, no doubt.

"Weird how?" asked Zabowski, predictably.

"Just anything out of the ordinary. Unexpected."

He frowned. "There was one weird thing. I found them this morning, actually, and brought them up to dissect. Four dead badgers in a ditch, and they were..." he trailed off thoughtfully. "Deformed, somehow. I've never seen anything like it. I want to show them to Ed, when he gets in tomorrow, see what he thinks. It's not any disease I know of, and if they were born that way... but they were all adult specimens. It's strange."

"Deformed," I echoed. "May I see?"

Phil Zabowski shrugged. "If you like. I don't see what they have to do with where Ed was, though."

"I'm interested in anything unusual connected to this," was all I said in reply.

"Well, sure. They're in the lab."

We trekked back down the stairs to the first floor, and through a keypad-locked door into a modern lab. It wasn't as swish as the morgue at Westminster, but it was almost as nice as Dr Walid's lab at the hospital. Zabowski located his badgers in cold storage and got them out to show me on a lab bench. I'm no expert on badgers, but they were definitely misshapen, too long in the limbs and with odd flattened muzzles like a pug.

"I've never seen anything like this," Zabowski said, prodding the dead animals again.

Neither had I, but I had a suspicion I knew what had caused it. I leaned in close, ignoring Zabowski's frown. The vestigia was very faint, but I recognised it, the razor and formaldehyde, the same as the spell that had been making the dead nightingale look exactly like Nightingale. What could you do with a badger?

"On Tuesday," I said slowly, "did you actually talk to Edward Brooks? I know you say you crossed paths with him several times on your fieldwork, but did you stop and chat? Have lunch together?"

"He called me a few times," said Zabowski, "and I'm sure he said hello and so on, but no, we didn't chat face to face. He said on the phone that he was going to the pub after we were finished, and I was asleep before he got in. But I definitely saw him several times during the day."

"Thank you," I said, "that's very helpful. I'm afraid we're going to have to take these in evidence."

He opened his mouth to protest that, but before he could get started with arguments I stepped away from him and called Dr Walid.

He answered on the first ring. "Peter," he said tensely, and I realised that after this morning he was expecting a different call.

"No news," I said quickly. "At least, not exactly. But I have something interesting for you. Four badgers. They've been, um, altered, and I want to know how."

"Birds, badgers, bizarre tooth marks. I'm a doctor, Peter, not a vet," he said, and I laughed. "I'm going to need to hire an assistant if this goes on. Please tell me it's not too far away this time. It took me almost an hour to get back to the hospital."

"Just round the corner," I said reassuringly. "UCL." I gave him the address and Zabowski's name. "I'll wait here for you." Once you've decided that something's evidence, you can't let it out of your sight. Even if it's four dead badgers.

"I'll be right over," he said. "You'll let me know at once if-"

"Yeah," I said quickly, "yeah, I will."

"What do you want the badgers for?" Zabowski said when I hung up.

"I'm afraid I can't discuss that," I said. I'm getting better at doing the high-handed police thing, and it sometimes works: Zabowski didn't argue further. He went through some notes in a file while we waited for Dr Walid to arrive, and I stared at the badgers and wondered.

Was it possible that Edward Brooks had used a badger as the raw material, as it were, to make into a simulacrum of himself. Something that would pass muster at a distance, that could wave and say hi to a workmate and tramp around the fields counting setts or whatever it was they were doing, while he went back to London? The phone calls would add verisimilitude, and until we got permission to delve into his phone records we wouldn't be able to tell whether he'd made the calls from a field outside Stroud or from St Julian's Road.

It would probably be harder to do than making an imitation dead body, like the difference between making a waxwork and making a robot. But if this Brooks was the Faceless Man's tame biologist and magician, he would have had a lot of practice at doing complicated things to humans and animals using magic. And with four dead badgers here, it looked like he'd tried several times before getting it right.

Dr Walid arrived after only about ten minutes, a bit out of breath. "Badgers," he muttered. He stared at them. "Yeah. I see what you mean."

Zabowski came back to look over our shoulders. "Am I going to get them back?" he asked. "Will you tell me what you find? If there's any environmental health issues-"

"I will notify the relevant authorities if anything comes up," said Walid reassuringly. "As for getting them back, I suppose it will depend on what happens with the case."

He got on with packing up the badgers to take away while I filled in the paperwork, more out of habit than anything else. It's not like the badgers were going to be part of any criminal trial where a defence lawyer would pick apart our procedure. But it's a good idea to keep the habit, just in case.

We left Zabowski sadly badger-less, and headed out in the same direction, until we reached one of the many entrances to UCH.

"So," Walid said, "what are you going to do now?"

I wished I knew.

"Well, don't do anything stupid," he said. I'm losing track of the number of people who've said that to me, it's starting to get annoying. But I didn't do anything stupid. Instead I did something sensible: I made my way through the crowded streets back to the Folly to get some supper and see what else was happening, and have a think.

It used to be that when I got stuck on a case and needed to work out what a good copper would do next, I'd ask myself what Lesley would do. The trouble is that I keep doing it, and getting her responses in my head, and then thinking, but is that because she's not a good copper at all? But Lesley would say, never mind theorising about what's going on, look at your leads, look at your actions, follow them up, keep pulling on strings until something comes loose.

Lesley was a good copper. That's the worst part of all this. She really was. And she'd also tell me that I needed to report in to Stephanopoulos with my new findings. And she was right.

So once I reached the Folly, I called Stephanopoulos. "You should have questioned the badgers," I said to her.

"Seriously?" she said. "What bullshit story do you have now?"

"I think I know how Edward Brooks made everyone think he was in Stroud on Tuesday. But I think he was up here. I think he's our man."

"Convince me, and I'll give him a tug."

"No," I said quickly. "He's definitely a practitioner, and a seriously powerful one. There's no way you can arrest him. And... all the evidence is, um. Weird bollocks. You can't get a warrant with it."

"I am getting sick of hearing this," said Stephanopoulos with slow and dangerous deliberation. "If he's responsible for kidnapping and murder, I'm bringing him in, weird bollocks or not."

"Give me a day, guv," I said. "I think I can use him to find Nightingale. And once we have Nightingale back, we can definitely arrest him." And then what? Somehow I didn't think that another tracking bracelet was going to do the trick. What had Nightingale done with criminal magicians in the past, I wondered. I had a feeling I wouldn't like the answer.

"Get me some evidence I can use to get a warrant," said Stephanopoulos. "And I don't want to hear that you've headed off and done something fucking stupid, d'you hear me?"

After I hung up, I thought about it. It was one of those paradoxes. Without Nightingale to provide some serious magical backup, there was no way we could arrest Edward Brooks. But unless we moved on Brooks, we weren't going to find Nightingale. And unlike the paradox we did in maths one day when our regular teacher was off sick and we had a supply teacher, the one where a guy has to ferry a goat, a cabbage and a wolf across a river in an implausibly small boat - I mean, cabbages don't take up a lot of space - there wasn't a clever solution to this one.

Or maybe there was and I just hadn't thought of it.

And where was the Faceless One himself in all of this? So far all the magic I'd encountered had been done by his subordinates, by this Brooks and by Lesley. He was undoubtedly involved, but was keeping himself out of the spotlight. It's not that I wanted to find out that he was personally involved and risk meeting him again given what happened the last two times I encountered him. But it's like when there's a giant spider in the room: you'd rather know where it is then have it vanish out of sight.

Behind me, someone cleared their throat, and I jumped and spun around.

Varvara Sidorovna was there. "Don't do that," I said. "Really, just don't. It's bad enough with Molly."

"Dinner is served," Varvara said blandly, but I had the strong sense that she was laughing at me.

I followed her into the dining room. Molly was there with a trolley, and I smelled steak and kidney pudding, roast potatoes and cabbage. Molly was reverting to comfort food under stress. I sat down to replenish my suet levels. Molly stood by, watching us with a hint of anxiety on her face.

"So," Varvara said after we'd addressed our plates for a few minutes, "you have not yet found him." If she'd sounded the least bit taunting or pleased, I thought Molly might have bitten her. But she didn't. She merely sounded soberly factual, like someone reading the news.

"I think I know who took him, and how," I said. "But not where."

"Or how to get him back." Again, that factual voice. I studied her thoughtfully. If I went on my own to arrest Brooks, it would be a disaster. But if Varvara would come with me...

"Have you ever heard of Edward Brooks?"

She shook her head. I rummaged around in my paperwork and found the photo from his driving license, and passed it to her.

"Ah," she said quietly. "The Doctor."

"He's a biologist," I said.

"He's known as the Doctor. And he is a close associate of your, ah, Faceless Man. His first apprentice, I believe." She gave me a look in which there was a flash of genuine concern. "You're not planning to tangle with him," she said, her intonation halfway between question and statement.

"You've heard of him, then." And apparently he didn't have a sense of irony, or didn't watch television, or both, if he went by 'The Doctor' as his street name. I suppose if you're a seriously ethically challenged magical practitioner, people don't say _Doctor who?_ to your face. Or make TARDIS woop-woop noises behind your back.

"He does... very unpleasant things ... to people who cross him or his Master. If you take him on, you will be lucky if you are killed."

Where, I wondered, did Brooks and the Faceless Man get the people they turned into cat-boys and the other creatures only Nightingale knew about? If I tackled him, would I find out, up close and personal? And then an even more awful thought: what did he want Nightingale for?

"But he has Nightingale," I said before I could stop myself.

Varvara made a choked sound, hastily swallowed a bite of potato, and laughed. I stared at her. "You truly think he would have the ability to - no, Peter Grant. Whatever he wants with the Nightingale, it isn't that."

"But he is holding him. If he just wanted him dead... he could have killed him days ago. So he must want something from him." It couldn't be any kind of hostage or ransom situation, because they hadn't made contact. In fact, they wanted us to believe Nightingale was dead. "Do they suppose they're trying to steal his magic?" You could only take someone's magic at the point of death, according to Nightingale, but if it required a lot of rituals and spells to set it up, it might take some time. And the Faceless Man wanted magic.

"It doesn't quite work like that," said Varvara. "The Nightingale is a tremendously powerful magician, but not because he has more magic in him than anyone else. He is," she slowed, thinking, "a better conduit than anyone else."

"A conduit?" I said. It made him sound like something from Thames Water. But it fit, too, with what I knew of how magic worked. I finished off the last few bites of steak and kidney pudding meditatively, then looked up.

"If you were with me," I said, "do you think I could arrest Brooks? You wouldn't have to do anything. But he must know of you, at least by reputation. If he saw you there, and some bodies from Stephanopoulos's team..."

But Varvara was shaking her head. "No," she said. "It would not be healthy for me to be seen at your side like that. And you should not even consider making the attempt on your own."

I didn't argue with her. Instead I waited while Molly cleared the plates and brought dessert, and carefully broke the top off the jam sponge pudding and waited for the superheated jam to cool. Once you've taken one bite of jam at boiling point, you don't do it again. It was a week before the burns inside my mouth fully healed.

If I went to see Brooks on my own, he'd roll right over me in moments. And then what? I didn't really taste the pudding, thinking about that.

"You're planning something else," she said after a few minutes, accusingly.

"So?" If she didn't want to help, then there wasn't much more I had to say to her.

"So if the Nightingale returns, and I think he will, then if something has happened to you in the meantime - well, that won't be healthy for me either."

"You're my prisoner," I felt compelled to point out. "You're not responsible for me. I'm responsible for you."

She gave a faint, dry smile. "I do not think this will feature in his reasoning."

Under the circumstances, I thought she was probably right about that. Nightingale had already made that fairly clear to her. "Besides, you've already said you don't want to be seen with me."

"I don't. But there may be some ... middle ground."

"Yes," I said thoughtfully. "There might." I finished the last few bites of pudding, thinking about what might be possible. If Varvara was willing to provide back-up so long as she stayed out of sight, that gave me a lot more options. "All right," I said. "In that case, I think we should start by taking that bracelet off you." And if we did find Nightingale, he would kill me for ruining his work. But I didn't see a better choice.

Varvara looked at me. "Indeed?" she said blandly. "And what if I immediately take you as a prisoner and trade you to your enemy in return for my old job back?"

I eyed her. "That wouldn't necessarily be a problem for me at the moment."

Varvara gave me a weird motherly look, half annoyed, half fond. "Peter," she said, "you're a rash, absurd, headstrong child. And I think you'd better explain what you're doing a bit more fully."

"You'll help me?"

"God help me," she said, "I think I will. The Nightingale is an interfering busybody, but he's a necessary part of the way things work here. If your plan isn't completely absurd, I will help you with it."

So we headed into the forge.

* * *

I rang ahead to let the suspect know I was coming. "It's PC Grant, with the Folly," I told him. "I need to talk to you about the disappearance of Inspector Nightingale. And with this terrible traffic, I didn't want to have a wasted journey, you know? Where can I meet you?"

He had a braying Home Counties accent. "Yes, yes, quite," he said. "I'm writing up my notes at home right now. Could you meet me there?" He reeled off an address in the 'nice' part of Camden.

I told him I'd be there in an hour, and hung up. Then I sat down at a desk in the library and finished what I'd been writing. Varvara came to find me, and I tossed her the keys to the Jag. Forensics had delivered it back to us yesterday afternoon while I'd been traipsing around looking at dead badgers. Under the circumstances, I thought we'd rather have it than the Asbo.

Varvara negotiated the Olympics traffic with a phlegmatic resignation, and dropped me off around the corner from Brooks's house with a cool nod. No 'good luck' or any last-minute suggestions, she just waited for me to get out and then headed off to find a secluded parking space of her own where she could power up the laptop. I hoped she would remember to take the battery out if it came to using magic.

Edward Brooks lived in a row of Victorian two-story terraces, muddy yellow London bricks and regular blocky bay windows so that the row looked like a giant sheet of serrated cardboard. Parked in a 'residents only' bay just outside was a four-year-old silver Toyota Prius. I checked the index. It matched the one the DVLA had assured me belonged to Edward Brooks. I stopped and tied my shoelace, which I had left untied for this purpose, and slid the tracker Agent Reynolds had given me under the rear bumper. There were, Varvara had told me, magical ways to track someone, but this had the advantage of leaving no vestigia for a practitioner to spot.

I rang the bell. The door opened suspiciously quickly, as if someone had been waiting in the hallway. I tensed, but was greeted with a smile.

"Good morning," said a tall middle-aged white man. His hair had receded since he'd last provided a photo for his driving license, but at least he wasn't attempting a comb-over. "You must be the police."

I showed him my warrant card. "PC Grant," I said. "Can I come in?"

He gave me a professionally friendly smile, like a doctor meeting a hypochondriac patient. "Of course. Though I'm not sure how I can help. I was down in Stroud counting badgers all last week."

"Yes, so Ms Preston told us. Still, we need to follow up everything, I'm sure you understand."

He ushered me into a living room-not, unusually, knocked through to the dining room. It was a nice room with the original fireplace and some ornate plasterwork on the coving, but the furniture let it down, all chipboard from Argos and the cheap ranges at Furniture Village and an impersonal white faux-leather sofa.

"Tea?" he said.

You always take the tea when interviewing a suspect: it gives you a moment to look around their gaff while they sort themselves out in the kitchen. I wandered past the single bookcase, and saw a shelf of popular biology books interspersed with Michael Crichton novels, and two rows of more serious academic stuff, and a couple of books about financial management and investing. But nothing like the row of magic books at the Preston house. I put my hand on the wall by the fireplace and closed my eyes, trying for the house's _sensus illic_, as Nightingale calls it. And very faintly, I caught the same vestigia I'd felt in the City and on the badgers: formaldehyde and chemicals and the Faceless Man's signature tune inside it all.

I wasn't surprised.

Edward Brooks came back in with two mugs of tea and handed me the yellow one with 'Dont Worry Be Happy' printed on it in Comic Sans. Nightingale would have made a comment about the apostrophe, I thought. I took a sip. It was strong builder's tea, presumably what he thought coppers might drink. His own brew looked like something paler and more sophisticated.

"How often do you visit Bella Preston's house?" I began.

"She comes here sometimes," he said, "but her place is nicer and more convenient for both our departments. A couple of times a week, I guess."

He drank his tea while I ran through a few more questions probing his knowledge of Bella's extended family and Nightingale himself. He said he'd met Margaret Allenby a few times and had heard Bella talking about other people.

"But I'm not that great at keeping track of her relations. They don't live around here anyway. I mean, do _you_ know all your partner's cousins and uncles?"

I was starting to feel queasy and dizzy, like I had a hangover, and then suddenly it was a really bad hangover, the kind when you can't do anything except lie in bed and whimper like a baby. I think I dropped the mug.

"Are you okay?" said Brooks, not sounding particularly sincere.

"This is what you did to Nightingale," I said, or tried to. It came out slurred, like when your mouth is numb after a trip to the dentist.

"Oh no," said Brooks. "This is what dear old Margaret did to the Nightingale. And to herself. I just, shall we say, collected the pieces afterwards. I believe my Master will be be pleased with my results when I present them to him. Yours, on the other hand-" He left the pause to fill itself.

"Where is your Master?" I managed to ask. "Haven't seen him around much in all this."

"This is my masterwork," Brooks said, sounding a little smug. "I suppose you won't get a chance to do yours. The final stage of my apprenticeship to him."

Nightingale on a platter. Yeah, the Faceless One probably would think it was a good prize. I was, I supposed, the parsley garnish on the side.

"'s a stupid idea," I mumbled, trying to sound confident. "Everyone knows I'm here."

"It doesn't matter," said Brooks. "By tonight they'll have plenty of other things to distract them."

That was important, and I knew it, but I couldn't remember why. And then sitting on the sofa was too hard, and I slithered off the cold slippery leather to the sanded pine floorboards and stared at the slowly revolving ceiling.

I lost track of what happened after that, and the next thing I really knew, I was being carried over someone's shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I kicked a bit, and was rewarded with a growl. A real growl, like a German Shepherd when it means business, but even louder and more terrifying, and the squeaky mammal inside my brain froze. All I could see was a pair of jeans, and something fluffy that my brain couldn't parse. A tail?

There was a roar of a motor, but not a car, and I was rocking from side to side. Whoever was carrying me stepped outside, and I smelled salt and mud and water. The river. Then there was a big jolt and I realised that whoever was carrying me had jumped. From one boat to another. My thoughts seemed slow and clogged. I was on a boat. There was a strong whiff of dustbins and rotting rubbish, and I turned my head enough to see that it was one of the waste transport boats. Not the big ones I'd seen at the recycling centre towing barges full of huge yellow containers stacked and lined up, but one of the smaller ones that serviced individual sites and businesses. It only had a single enormous waste container running the length of the boat, the size of a caravan.

There was a series of clanks and cranks, and then I was carried into the container. I couldn't see a thing in the darkness, but I knew what it was filled with. Another series of clanks, and I was unceremoniously hurled down on the ground, and that was it for me for at least a couple of minutes.

"Peter," said a familiar voice. "Peter, wake up!"

I peeled my eyes open again and looked around. There was light from a small wind-up lamp, and I could see that the cell was tiny, barely twice the size of a toilet cubicle. There was a crate of bottled water, and another with military-style ready meals, and a covered bucket whose purpose I could guess. And Inspector Nightingale was shaking my shoulder.

I tried to prop myself up on one elbow, but it went a bit wrong somewhere and Nightingale caught me. "Peter," he repeated. "Dammit. Dammit to hell."

I hadn't been expecting hugs and smiles, but that stung a bit. "Sir," I said. "Are you okay?" I tried to get a good look at his face in the dim light, but my vision was still blurry.

"You idiot," he said. "I was afraid of this." He checked me over for injuries as he spoke. "I've told you before. Anything that's strong enough to catch me will destroy you. But no. You had to jump right in after me." He sat back cross-legged on the floor, still holding my head and shoulders. The cell was small enough that there wasn't really any other option. "Did they drug you?"

"Yeah," I said. "Edward Brooks. I think he's the Faceless Man's apprentice, maybe his number two guy."

"Not Maggie, then," he said. "I didn't want it to be Maggie. I remember when she was a baby."

"Margaret Allenby?" I said. "She didn't know anything about it. Or Bella. Brooks was using them to get to you." A long-range plan. Brooks must have started the whole relationship with Bella eighteen months ago just to have a chance of getting under Nightingale's guard one day. As if we needed any more proof that he was an utter bastard.

"I see." From the faint menace in Nightingale's voice, he didn't approve of his great-great-niece being used like that either.

I was feeling a bit less dizzy, and managed to sit up this time. Nightingale kept a hand on my shoulder. "Don't attempt any magic," he said. "It doesn't work in here."

"I know. Styrofoam. That's how I found you."

"You found me," Nightingale echoed. "You mean you were captured."

"I mean I found you. This is the rescue mission, sir." I broke away from his grip and didn't immediately keel over. He didn't look impressed at this display of my rescuing ability.

"You," he said, "are not supposed to be the rescue mission."

"Well, who is, then?" I said, a bit more crossly than I'd intended. "You were planning to wait for Lady Ty to come looking for you? We're going to get out of here."

Nightingale said nothing. I leaned back against the wall of the cell and unfastened my jeans. Nightingale gave me a look. "What," he asked carefully, "are you doing?"

"I wasn't good at much in training," I said, "but I could hide things on me better than anyone else." I unpicked some of the stitching and began to fumble with the waistband, and then my boxers as well. Everything was a bit warm and icky, but it was all still there. Brooks had gone through my pockets and taken everything he thought I was carrying, but he hadn't found this. I pulled it out one item at a time: a couple of nice sharp razor blades from my jeans, and two small staff cores. "You can't do magic because the styrofoam prevents you drawing on anything outside yourself," I said. "But you can use these."

Nightingale picked up one of the cores and turned it between his fingers. "You cut one of my standard ones down?" he said. "And... this isn't yours or mine. Varvara."

"She said she could take the risk more easily than I could," I said. "She spent all night putting magic into it. You're going to need to do a new bracelet later on."

"And the blades too." Nightingale shook his head. "And do you have a plan for what to do with all this?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "I don't know if you know, but you're inside a big rubbish container on a boat on the river. We get out of the container, we can take control of the boat and get to the shore and get help."

"And you have backup?"

"Varvara is tracking us, I hope. At least as far as the river. Stephanopoulos ... is investigating your disappearance, and as soon as we make contact she can have all the bodies we need to clean this up."

"Miriam never signed off on you planning this stunt," said Nightingale. "Am I going to have to have another conversation with the DPS?"

"I hope so, sir. It's either that or stay in the Faceless Man's Rubbish Retirement Home for Wizards."

"I did enjoy the opportunity of catching up on my sleep," said Nightingale. "Very well." He examined the staff cores again.

"How much magic did you try to do before you realised about this place?" I asked. "I'm not sure you should do anything else until Dr Walid has checked you out."

"Lesley," said Nightingale with painful precision, "informed me of the nature of the cell. I conducted some small tests, but concluded she was telling the truth quickly. I don't think I'm in any danger."

"She told you? You talked to her?"

"Briefly, through the door," Nightingale said. "Other than that I have not had any contact with them." He looked away from me and then said abruptly, "What day is it, Peter?"

Locked in here, I realised, he had absolutely no way of measuring time. "Friday afternoon. At least, I think it's probably afternoon by now, it was about eleven I was kidnapped."

"Oh," he said. "I thought - never mind."

"Have they communicated with you at all?" I asked. "Given you any clue of what's going on?"

"Nothing. I passed out in Maggie's sitting room and woke up here."

"They're planning something for the Olympic opening ceremony," I said. "At least, that's my best guess. According to what Brooks said, the end-game is tonight for them, and that's the opening ceremony. There's something weird going on with money, I don't entirely understand it but Walbrook says they've been investigating stocks and bonds that will gain in value if something big happens, something bad. I think it's a get-rich-quick plan."

"The money trail," Nightingale said. "Always the best way to catch criminals, and even practitioners need cash. So they buy on the market cheaply now, do something dramatic at the Olympics, and then sell their investments and make a packet. Not bad, as plans go. But what do they want me for?"

I hesitated. "They wanted to take magic, before. At Skygarden. You said once it's possible to steal someone's magic by killing them."

"Yes. That was my guess too, though compared to what they were trying at Skygarden, one person is small beer for them." Nightingale sounded remarkably unruffled by the idea. "But they remove a thorn from their side. You're a bonus, I suppose - they wanted me, but since you decided to stick your head into the lion's mouth, they're taking you as well."

"Except that we're going to get out of here," I said firmly, while a part of my mind pictured Nightingale sitting here for days contemplating his death.

"Is the, ah, 'Faceless Man' involved in this?" Nightingale asked after a while. "Because if he's out there... well. That will be more difficult."

"So far he's not been directly involved. I think this is all Brooks. He's trying to impress his master, or something like that."

"The end of his apprenticeship, perhaps," said Nightingale. "Hm. That's just as well."

Nightingale hadn't been sure he could take the Faceless Man in a fair fight, I remembered. I really hoped he could take Brooks.

"So we're in a boat on the river, you say?" Nightingale asked. "That explains... I could have sworn everything was going up, earlier. That must have been a lock. Describe to me again what you saw outside."

I tried to remember every last detail of the layout of the boat and the people on it, but I knew it wasn't very good intel, since I'd been drugged and upside-down and only saw it for a minute. But it was the best we had. Nightingale listened intently.

"Well," he said, "I guess that's as good as we can get. There's Brooks, May and possibly a chimera on the boat. You'll leave Brooks to me." He leaned in a bit. "But you need to tell me now, Peter: can you shoot Lesley?"

"She shot me first," I said, too quickly. I'd been trying not to think about this for days. Weeks. If it came to it, could I send a fireball at Lesley and mean it? "I can take her, sir," I said, and hoped it was true.

"Hm," he grunted. "Very well. As for the chimera, you've handled them before. They have the weaknesses as well as the strengths of their animal type." He turned the staff between his fingers. "One more thing," he said. "If the purpose of this is to cause disruption and panic, then it's no good if you stop them by setting the Olympic stadium on fire or any of your other little stunts. Our side of this has to be discreet."

I thought this was a bit rich from a man who could throw buildings in the air, but I didn't say anything. After all, he _can_ throw buildings in the air.

I settled down to work on the hinges of the inner door. Lesley might have designed this cell, but she hadn't built it herself, because she would never have put the hinges on the inside. Amateurs. A small knife blade isn't the ideal tool for undoing a screw, and I was thinking that if I ever had to do this again I'd try to hide a little multitool in my waistband as well, but I got there in the end. Nightingale sat behind me watching, but said nothing.

When I had both hinges off, I carefully swung the door in, trying not to let it bang. It didn't move as easily as it would have on its hinges, but there was room for a person to squeeze through. Nightingale raised the lamp. Beyond was a narrow tunnel going through the styrofoam insulation, and another door at the end which led to the outside.

I clambered through the hatch and into the passageway, then looked back. Nightingale began to follow me, and I noticed that he was moving slowly and painfully.

"Sir," I said, "are you sure you're all right?"

"It's just cramp," he said, a little irritably. "It won't affect my ability to do magic."

I nodded, then thought about what he hadn't said. "What about your ability to jump off the boat and run like hell, sir?"

"You let me worry about that," he said.

But I did worry as he struggled through the hatch. I'd been trapped under the platform at Oxford Circus for only a few hours, and I'd been a wreck afterwards. Nightingale had been in here for three days. And while I could get out of this cell on my own, we wouldn't be able to get off the boat without him at his best.

* * *

You can plan all you want, and it's important to make plans, but when you actually get your size elevens on the ground, the only thing you can be sure of is that your plan will be shot to hell in minutes. I finished working the hinges loose with the blade, a fiddly task at the best of times, and carefully pulled out the screws. Nightingale picked up the little wind-up lamp and held it at shoulder height between us.

"Look at the light for a bit," he said. "So you won't be so dazzled when we get out there."

It was a good idea, and I obediently stared at the light for about thirty seconds, making bright spots dance in my field of vision.

"All right," Nightingale said, setting the lamp down. "Lift that out carefully. Then I go through first."

I didn't argue with that. I hadn't been the rearguard at Ettersberg. I got the door out, and despite our efforts, we were both dazzled by the light. It was a grey London evening, but compared to the cell it was blindingly bright. Nightingale clambered past me, his movements still stiff and hampered, and slid out onto the deck. I followed, my vision adjusting as I went.

At least I'd been right about where the door came out, at the front of the boat. There was about a metre of clearance, then the upright orange post of the crane, and beyond that a lot of neatly stacked crates. But I'd been wrong about who was on the boat.

Standing in the front, one foot up on the side, was the tallest Somali woman I'd ever seen. She was wearing practical work clothes, a high-viz vest over jeans and a plain navy tunic, and workman's boots. And a purple silk hijab which had been far too fancy for a cleaner and was also too fancy for a waste disposal operative or whatever she was now. Awa Shambir really was one of the Faceless Man's people.

And more, she was a practitioner. She was facing half away from us, but some movement in the corner of her eye must have alerted her, because she turned and I could sense the _forma_ taking shape in her mind and tasted mint and fresh blood, like when your gums bleed brushing your teeth. She was fast. But three days in a cell or not, Nightingale was faster, and I barely had time to register the sense of his _signare_ before his spell hit her. She staggered backwards and nearly fell overboard into the canal.

Not the river, I noticed: we were no longer on the Thames. That had been a lock Nightingale had felt the boat going through, before I was brought aboard, and now we were on a canal.

With the Industrial Revolution came the need to transport the factory-made goods around the country and to the ports. The roads were terrible and expensive, and the railways hadn't been invented yet, but there were plenty of navigable rivers. And where there weren't rivers, the great canal companies built canals, which became the best way of getting your cotton and pottery from A to B in large quantities in a reasonable time. And everyone wanted to get their boatloads of goods to London. So a lot of canals run through the city, mostly branching off the Grand Union Canal that runs from London to Birmingham. But I could tell from the buildings around us, a mixture of derelict sites and half-finished urban regeneration projects, that we weren't in Little Venice or at the Grand Junction, but in the mess of waterways known as the Bow Back Rivers that feed into the Thames, where London's own mills and factories and warehouses had been. In Stratford to be precise, right where the Olympic Park now stood.

Awa Shambir recovered her balance and shouted an alarm, then fired off another spell at me. I ducked behind the crane's post, and something that felt like an enormous net whisked past my ear. This time there was no counter-spell from Nightingale, and I glanced at him and my stomach churned.

Nightingale was motionless as if he'd been frozen in place, his arms extended in a crucifixion position, a look of horrified understanding on his face.

"Get out of here!" he shouted to me. "Get off the boat! Don't use magic!"

Shambir was advancing slowly on us, a little smile on her lips. From the look in his eyes, I thought Nightingale was struggling against whatever was holding him, but he couldn't move. I lunged for him and grabbed him by one arm and tried to haul him. I might as well have grabbed the crane arm and tried to use it to pull the boat. He was fixed in place.

"Stupid boy," he snapped at me. "It's a trap. Get off the boat!"

The canal wasn't very wide, and I probably could have jumped onto the towpath if I'd tried. But I didn't. I've seen this story before, and I know how it goes. The wise old mentor stays behind to fight the Big Bad, and loses, while his young apprentice escapes with a new motive to fight and win. Gandalf plummets into the Mines of Moria, and Dumbledore falls off a tower, and all the rest of it. I've seen this story and I know how it goes, and my opinion of it is: fuck that shit.

So I stayed where I was and shot a fireball at Awa Shambir.

Nightingale swore under his breath, and not because there was anything wrong with my spellwork. As I released it, I understood what had happened to Nightingale. It was literally a trap, a web of spells and lines I hadn't noticed before drawn on the deck, centring on the door to the container. When Nightingale had cast his first spell, the trap had closed on him. I felt it try to hold me as well, but I wasn't in the right spot and the energy of the spell had been used up on Nightingale. I froze anyway with my arms outstretched. Nightingale tried to look at me, and I didn't know whether he realised I was shamming or not.

"That's better," said Shambir, and she didn't seem to realise. "It's all right," she called to someone at the back of the boat. "They got out somehow, but it's all working perfectly anyway. Just a bit early. It'll hold for the next three hours."

I didn't turn my head to see who she was talking to, though it was a near thing. There were footsteps moving along the side of the boat, and what sounded for all the world like claws clacking on the metal. Finally I saw the dog chimera emerge and stand menacingly not far from Shambir. I stared at the chimera for a moment, comparing him to the tiger-boy I'd met last summer. But then I abruptly lost all interest in him when the next person came into my field of vision.

It was Lesley.

She was wearing a similar outfit to Shambir: jeans, workboots and a high-viz jacket over a loose t-shirt. And she was still masked. If she'd been promised her face, she didn't have it yet. "I said that cell wasn't secure," she said. "I could have broken out of it."

"It held him all week," Shambir said defensively.

"Never build a prison you can't escape from," I said. "It's on the Evil Overlord list, isn't it? Or it should be."

Lesley looked at me then, her eyes glaring through the mask, and I had to remind myself over and over that I was pretending to be completely paralysed from the neck down, like Nightingale was. I had her attention now, and she would spot any slips I made.

"Hi, Lesley," I said, amazed my voice was steady. "What's it like on the dark side?"

Nightingale made a sound like he wanted to say something, but didn't. Lesley didn't answer.

"Let her be," said Awa Shambir. "You have no idea-"

"Enjoying being on the other side of this? Your new friends held you and me at gunpoint a few months ago, remember that?"

"You're not being held at gunpoint," Lesley said. "We're not going to kill you."

"Are you sure of that?" said Nightingale quietly. "Because that's not how it looks from where I'm standing."

Lesley's poker face was always good and the mask made it even better, but I saw her react to that, just a little. She didn't completely know what was going to happen to us.

"We're not planning to kill people," said Shambir.

Which was interesting. "So what are you going to do with the Olympics, then, if you're not going to kill people?" I asked brightly.

"What makes you think we have anything to do with the Olympics?" Shambir said.

"Do me a favour," I answered. "The stadium's right there and the opening ceremony is starting ... soon. Three hours, isn't it?"

"Nobody's going to get hurt," said Lesley.

"Yeah?" I said. "A terrorist attack on the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and nobody's going to get hurt?" I looked suddenly at Shambir. "I bet I can guess who's set up to take the fall for it, too."

She gave me a flat-lipped frown. "There's no attack."

"Really? Then why's your boss busily buying up stocks that will soar in value if there's a big terrorist scare in London?"

They both gave me dirty looks then, but I knew from the way Lesley had twitched that they hadn't known about that.

"If it's not terrorism, what is it you think you're doing?"

Lesley didn't answer, but Shambir said, "Siphoning off magic."

"Like you tried from Skygarden?"

Again, no response, but I didn't need one. I didn't have a clue how they were intending to go about siphoning off the magic from the Olympics opening ceremony, but evidently they thought they'd found a way. The network of ropes on the deck seemed to lead to the crates, and I realised they must be full of dog batteries, like the garage at Skygarden had been. And then I remembered Varvara Sidorovna last night, saying that the reason Nightingale was so powerful was because he had trained himself to be an excellent conduit for magic. Was that what they wanted him for?

Nightingale hadn't spoken through all this, but he wasn't looking like he wanted me to stop.

"So how's it going to work?" I asked. We're taught to keep people talking, you understand, it's not that I was curious about what they'd come up with and what it might tell me about what magic was and how it worked.

Lesley gave me a dirty look that suggested that she'd spotted both my motives and didn't like either of them, but Shambir answered, "The safety barriers. There's miles of them around the venue. We're connecting up to them."

Which was interesting from a policing standpoint as well as a science-of-magic one. Nothing they'd done to the safety barriers had attracted any police attention despite all the Olympic security. I wondered if Lesley had handled that. And I wondered how it worked. "Really?" I said. "How did you-"

"Stop it," Lesley said. "He can keep this up all day, asking silly questions."

"I don't think you've got any grounds left to accuse me of doing stupid shit," I retorted a bit more hotly than I'd meant to.

Nightingale did clear his throat then, and I knew what he was warning me about. I've always hated it in thrillers when the hero stops his life-saving escape bid so that he can have a long personal row with someone. Now I understood the temptation.

But Lesley didn't have anyone to tell her to stop talking, and she'd been ignoring Nightingale. She looked at him full on for a minute now, and then back at me.

"What do you think _he's_ planning to do to us?" she said to me. "I know all about your death squad. Perhaps we might get off lightly for being human, for just being magic users like that Varvara, but what do you think's going to happen to Gus there if he gets caught?" She gestured to Dog-boy. I looked at him properly for the first time.

Like the tiger-boy who'd fought me on the rooftops in Soho, he was furry, thick grey fur that must have been hot even in this cool weather. His face was misshapen, jaw elongated and nose dark and wet, eyes large and liquid brown. He wore a t-shirt and shorts, cheap and simple. His feet were wrong, the toes clawed. I wondered how complicated it must be to combine a dog's anatomy with a person's in a way that didn't make life completely impossible, and remembered Carey mentioning that his stride pattern was different from a person's. And then there was the tail, held up and still right now, watchful.

"Yeah, and where'd he come from?" I said, to disguise the fact that I knew Nightingale probably would consider putting him down to be a good solution, just as if he was a dog that had killed a person. "He wasn't born that way, I bet. Did your boss keep him in one of those cages in Dr Moreau's Strip Club?"

Interestingly, it was Shambir who winced at that. "I don't know," said Lesley in that flat tone that meant she was as uncomfortable as I was about that side of things. Ha.

But I could see the problem. It was the same as Simone's, I guess, though Dog-boy Gus was a lot less cute. I'd told Nightingale I was shallow, and I was, but the trouble with that sort of insight is that once you have it, you have to not be shallow the next time. If the Faceless Man and his Doctor Brooks had made Gus out of - who? Someone nobody would miss, probably - then what options did he have? Be locked up and prostituted, or get promoted to security and muscle. It wasn't like he could contact any of the charities and groups that work with trafficked people and modern slaves, not after the Doctor had finished transforming him. And if he went to the police, they'd call in Nightingale, but what would Nightingale do?

What would we do with him if I managed to get us out of this?

That, I decided, was a problem that could wait until we did get out of this. And then I'd also have the opportunity to talk to Lesley as much as I wanted, from the good side of an interview table.

The noise from the engine changed, interrupting my thoughts. "We're nearly there," said Shambir, sounding relieved. The boat gradually slowed and veered in towards the side of the canal. Shambir gave us a final suspicious look and went to the front of the boat again, grabbing a rope and standing with one foot on the edge, ready to jump ashore. Lesley returned to the rear, and I heard her voice speaking to someone else, too muffled by the engine noises to make out the words. Dog-boy Gus continued to watch us with determined brown eyes. I wondered what he thought of all our conversation.

We struck the side with a bump that staggered me, though Nightingale didn't move from where he was held. Fortunately Shambir was jumping onto the towpath and didn't notice. And if Gus noticed, he didn't say anything. With a few more grinding and scraping noises, the boat came to a rest and I saw out of the corner of my eye that Lesley was mooring it at the other end. Shambir looped her rope through a metal ring concreted into the edge of the towpath and pulled it taut.

I took the opportunity to whisper to Nightingale, "How do we get out of this?"

"Break the lines," he answered, looking at the fine cords positioned around the deck, spiralling outward from where we were standing. Now that I thought about it, I noticed that Shambir and Lesley had both been careful not to step on them.

I was about to move, to try to slash through them, when Edward Brooks stepped around the side of the boat, and I froze. "So here we are," he said. "Two for the price of one. I doubt your apprentice will be much use to me-seeing what little you've managed to teach Miss May, I don't have much hope of this one being any better."

Nightingale didn't answer. Probably the most dignified choice, all things considered. So I kept my mouth shut too, even though it was quite hard to do. I really wanted to make TARDIS sounds.

"Now I'm not going to stand around talking," he said, always a wise choice for a villain, "so let's get started, and I hope you enjoy the experience." He stepped wide around us, and jumped onto the shore. Dog-boy jumped back up along with Lesley, both watching us intently. Awa Shambir half-sat on the side of the boat, also looking in our direction. Four magic users all with their full attention on us: I didn't like those odds, and I could hardly ask Nightingale what he thought. So I kept very still.

Shambir uncoiled what looked like a high-voltage electrical cable which was connected at one end to the network of fine ropes on the deck around Nightingale and me. It wasn't electrical cable, I saw at a closer look, but the same fine rope braided and twisted into a much thicker rope. Brooks took the loose end and carried it a few steps along the towpath. There was a white line painted on the ground. It looked just like the other hundreds of lines that get painted on the pavement by everyone from the water companies to the electricity board, which mark out what's buried underground. But this line continued along the towpath, then branched off along a footpath running towards the Olympic Stadium. You couldn't walk down there today, of course: there was a six-foot high fence and security cameras. But this had been planned out well.

"You're planning to run magic along that?" I said. "I didn't know you could run magic along a cable."

Nobody answered me, though Shambir looked like she wanted to. Brooks looked up from his rope. "Hook them up," he called.

Shambir approached us, and pulled a knife from her belt. I tensed: if this was what it looked like, I had to cut the lines now no matter how bad the odds were. But she went towards my arms, outstretched in an imitation of Nightingale's pose.

"Sorry about this," she said, sounding as genuine as a train operator apologising for the delay, "but it's how the spell works." She made a small cut along my index finger, which hurt an astonishing amount for a relatively small wound. A few drops of blood fell onto the deck. Shambir took the point of the knife and traced the blood into a line until it connected with the network of ropes.

When she repeated the process with my left hand, I heard Nightingale make a small sound that I recognised as frustrated anger. Shambir looked warily at him, and I realised she'd done me first on purpose, as the easier one.

Nightingale didn't - couldn't - move while she repeated the process on his hands, cutting his fingers until blood dripped to the deck. I ground my teeth. The next possible opening, I told myself, and I'd take it.

"Ready," Shambir called back to Brooks. "It all looks good here."

Interesting, I thought, that she had no way to tell I wasn't hooked up to the network completely the way Nightingale was.

Brooks took the end of his cord and knelt down, holding it against the white line painted on the ground, and began to cast a spell.

The spell was strong enough to make the hairs on my arms stand up. Nightingale inhaled sharply, and then there was a cracking sound like someone bellyflopping into a pool. The end of the cord seemed to be fused with the ground. Brooks sat back on his heels, sweat running down his face. And Nightingale slumped, his head sinking forwards and his hands limp, like he'd passed out standing up. Blood dripped from his fingers.

"It's working!" said Shambir suddenly from where she was standing by the crates. "It works!" She sounded as honestly delighted as - as I had when I figured out how to prevent magic shorting out my phone. It took me a moment to remember that the machine that was working was somehow siphoning magic from the Olympic stadium and channelling it through Nightingale into their dog batteries.

And it was killing Nightingale. Lesley stared at him in concern, and then at me in sudden suspicion, wondering why I wasn't affected, and I knew it was now or never. Brooks was still on the ground, panting, and Shambir was on the far side of the crates engrossed in something. I palmed the razorblade into my hand, picked out the rope I was going to cut, and lunged for it.

* * *

It was a good sharp razorblade, as used by hard men throughout London, and it cut into the rope with ease. Lesley was still opening her mouth to shout and Dog-boy was jumping back onto the boat by the time I had sliced it through. There was a strange hissing sound, Shambir gave a shout of dismay, and Nightingale collapsed bonelessly to the deck.

I was just about to shoot a fireball at Brooks when Gus the Dog-boy jumped me, snarling, with absolutely no appreciation of the time I'd spent considering his ethical treatment as a prisoner. The general public is like that: you try to work out whether they're diabetic, have a head injury or are just plain drunk while they swear abuse at you and try to smack you in the face. Or, in this case, try to rip your throat out. I had an all too vivid understanding of just how Pete Winning had died. I twisted and he missed his bite but sent me sprawling. There was a sudden flash by my left ear, and Dog-boy yelped wildly and scrambled off me.

Nightingale was still collapsed on the deck, but his eyes were open and alert. His second fireball missed me by inches. Gus splashed into the water. I didn't look to see what had happened to him, because Lesley was coming at me. So I made the _impello palma_ forma.

The deck of a working canal boat is not a good place for a magical fight. For one thing, it's not very big. This was a wide-beam boat, eleven feet wide, but that's still pretty small in real terms. And there was the crane, and the stacks of crates beyond it containing the dog batteries, and then a very basic safety railing before you got to the edge of the boat. I was on the far side, away from the towpath, and Lesley had been leaning against the side of the big container that had been Nightingale's prison. So when Lesley got to my big flat invisible shield, it cornered her so that she couldn't go around it without falling in the water. Instead she stared at me in deep annoyance, then began to scramble up on top of the container to get around it that way.

Brooks was on his feet. Nightingale was not, but he was sitting up, an abstracted look on his face. He had both of my mini-staffs in his left hand, and his right hand was outstretched. He and Brooks were both completely still, watching each other like two territorial cats across a street. When I'd seen Nightingale duel with Varvara it had been explosive and spectacular, flying walls and roofs and gas cylinders. This was the opposite: silent and still and incredibly tense. I could feel _formae_ shaping and shifting, but never settling into a burst of magic. I think Lesley was mesmerised by it too, because she stopped on top of the container, watching.

Then I noticed where Shambir was. She was ignoring Nightingale and Brooks, kneeling over the cable I'd cut. I could sense the mint and blood taste of her spell as she tried to repair it. I had no idea whether it would reset the trapping spell or not, but I couldn't wait and see. I let go my _impello palma_ shield and jumped her. I didn't try magic: the impression I'd got was that while Shambir wasn't in Nightingale's class of magician, she could probably have given, say, Varvara Sidorovna a run for her money. And as I'd discovered with Varvara, it's a good idea not to let that kind of magician have a chance to use magic against you.

We both rolled sideways and crashed into the base of the crates. And while she was a big strong woman, Shambir wasn't a fighter, not like Varvara had been. I had her pinned face-down in moments. I didn't know what I was going to do with her next; it's not like I had my cuffs on me, but as it happened I didn't have to find out. Dog-boy was back.

Dripping wet and very angry-looking, he must have scrambled onto the prow of the boat and come quietly around the side of the crates. I whirled around, and as I did I felt Shambir cast her net spell. I ducked straight into the path of Gus the Dog-boy, we both scrambled frantically for balance and fell off the side of the boat. I braced. It was July and this was a canal rather than the Thames, but still, it would be freezing.

I never touched the water. Something like a giant invisible hand grabbed me mid-fall and shoved me back onto the deck of the boat. It did not do the same for Dog-boy, and I saw him splash in and start swimming, again. Doggy paddle, naturally. I fell onto the deck in a startled heap.

Nightingale wasn't even looking at me, still intent on Brooks, but I'd felt his _signare_ in the spell. "Thanks," I gasped. He didn't look distracted, but rescuing me must have given Brooks some kind of opening, because Nightingale suddenly burst into flames. I yelped. But I could feel Nightingale's counter-spell, and the flames died as suddenly as they'd appeared, leaving him apparently unsinged. He gave a twist of his hand, and all of the crates stacked up at the front of the boat shot in different directions: eight at Brooks and one each at Shambir and Lesley.

That was when we all found out what Brooks had been planning as his little explosive addition to the opening ceremony. Nine of the crates simply crashed - Shambir gave a cry of real distress that I think had nothing to do with the attack and everything to do with her work being thoroughly destroyed - but the tenth, the one aimed at Lesley, blew up spectacularly.

It wasn't a single explosion. It was a series, first one ominous whump inside the steel crate, then the second splintering it. Nightingale didn't waste time. He shot out his right arm, and the exploding crate flew at high speed along the surface of the canal for about three hundred metres before he dropped it in the water.

There was a quiet, modest splash as it went in, and for a moment I thought nothing else would happen. Then a column of water shot at least ten feet into the air and spilled outwards, splattering mud and canal slime and a rusted and dented supermarket shopping trolley onto the towpath. A moment later the boat slammed into the side of the canal as the shockwave hit, then jerked away. The metal ring the boat was tied to at the back ripped right out of the pavement, and we slewed sideways across the canal until the boat wedged crosswise. We all staggered and I saw Lesley fall flat on her masked face on the top of the container with a cry that made me try to scramble up towards her until I realised what I was doing. I grabbed the railing instead.

Like I said, I don't think canal boats are a great place for a fight.

Brooks was safely on land and unshaken. He'd easily fended off all of the crates aimed at him. They'd bounced off, much like when I'd seen the Faceless Man make his spherical shield. And now, as we all tried to recover our balance as the boat continued to rock and bob about, he made his counter-attack.

I heard Nightingale's gasp and saw shadowy feathers start to form on his face. Brooks was an expert in taking people and turning them into animal chimeras. It made sense that he'd try it in a fight. But I doubted he'd ever tried to do this on a fellow magician before.

Nightingale's fist clenched on the two mini-staffs he was holding, and the feathers faded away. I could feel the formaldehyde and scalpel _signare_ of Brooks's next spell, but it seemed to have no effect: Nightingale was undoing it as fast as Brooks could work. From the side of the boat I heard a weird animal whimper. Gus the Dog-boy had clambered onto the boat just before the explosion, but now slid back into the water, ears flat back and his face turned away from Brooks.

For a moment I thought I saw a shadow of a beak on Nightingale's face. His hand shook slightly. I needed to do something. I moved cautiously towards Brooks.

Lesley opened her hand and shot a fireball at me. And missed by a good two metres. Now we've spent a long time playing Pocket Quidditch and I know how good Lesley's aim is. She can bounce a tennis ball off my head better than nine times out of ten, and she'd had a nice clear shot at me. I looked at her, but her mask was in place and her body was very still, and I didn't have a clue what she was thinking. Maybe she was still shaken up by the exploding crate that had nearly taken her head off.

Or maybe she'd meant to miss. But I didn't have time to think about anything, because Shambir was up on her feet too, stalking up on Nightingale the way I was on Brooks. I opened my mouth to shout, or maybe try a spell, but I could see I wasn't going to be quick enough. Shambir was no fool and she wasn't trying to take Nightingale with magic now. Just distract him long enough for Brooks to do his transformation.

From shore, somewhere out of sight, there came a sudden flash of wet dog and vodka and a freezing blast of air. The deck of the boat froze like ice and Shambir skidded over backwards. Nightingale still didn't look around, but Brooks made a fierce effort anyway, shouting the Latin of his spell aloud, and for a moment the whole boat seemed to stink of formaldehyde. Nightingale swayed.

Brooks's face was red and dripping sweat. He choked mid-word, one hand jerking up to clutch at his head. The magic fizzled out and he dropped to his knees, then fell face-first onto the pavement. Nightingale's mouth went very tight. He didn't move. I stared between them.

Behind me, I heard scuffling noises. Lesley had grabbed Shambir by the arm and they were both running along the top of the container to the far end of the boat, wedged against on the wrong side of the canal away from the towpath and the stadium. They jumped off and started to scramble over the wall there. I didn't try to catch up or stop them. This was the Olympic opening ceremony, the place was swarming with security, and pretty much every police officer in the city had seen Lesley's very distinctive mugshot lately. If she could get past all that... well, maybe she deserved to escape.

Brooks was still motionless on the towpath. I went to Nightingale, sitting slumped against the side of the container. "Are you all right, sir?"

"I'll do." He sat up and straightened his shirt in a futile attempt to make his four-day-old clothes seem tidier, then allowed me to help him to his feet. His hands were still bleeding. "You were free all along," he said in tones that did not bode well for me. "You could have jumped off the boat and escaped at any time."

"And we won," I said, looking him full in the eye and taking advantage of the fact that I was taller than him, not to mention better dressed at that precise moment. "And you're not dead. Do you have a point, sir?"

He met my eye, then said, "I suppose I knew what I was dealing with after the first month, as far as you're concerned. But your loyalty is not to me, Peter. It is to the law."

"Yeah, well, there's only the two of us left now," I said. "And if there's one thing I've realised over the past few days, it's that there's not going to be much law around here without you."

"You'd find your way if you had to." He walked carefully over the icy deck to the side. I helped him jump ashore and we both went to inspect Brooks.

"He's alive," I said in some surprise. "We need an ambulance." I turned him into the recovery position. Like I said, police work means that you're trying to stop someone killing you one minute and trying to save their life the next. But there wasn't anything else I could do for him right now.

"Stroke, I expect," Nightingale said. "Those staffs you brought made a difference. Where has Varvara gone?"

I turned around until I spotted her lurking at the side of a building. I gave her a wave, and with visible reluctance she came over.

"Thanks," I said. I felt like someone should be thanked for all this rescuing if I wasn't going to be. "Just at the right moment there."

She gave a faint distant smile, and I wondered whether she might have come in on the other side if she'd judged them more likely to win. Perhaps. But then, perhaps not. It wasn't like there was any way to know, and she had helped us when we'd needed it.

"You seemed to have things well in hand up till then." She looked at Nightingale with just a hint of worry on her face. He regarded her with his full attention.

"I perceive that you've been keeping an eye on Constable Grant for me," he said. "Good. Do you have a telephone?"

I extended a hand, and Varvara gave me my best mobile. I'd only taken a cheap backup with me to interview Brooks, because I knew he'd take it from me. I scrolled down until I got to Stephanopoulos's number.

"Yes?" she said tartly. "What is it now? You want me to interview any more livestock?"

"I've got him. Inspector Nightingale. It's over. I need an ambulance and some support at, um, where are we?"

Varvara gave me the address, and I heard Stephanopoulos groan. "You do realise you're about two hundred metres away from the edge of the Olympic Park?" If she was relieved to hear we were okay, she hid it well.

"Yes, I know," I said. "There was something planned for the opening ceremony. It's not going to happen now."

I heard Stephanopoulos swear. "You'd better be damn sure about that."

I thought of Lesley and Shambir fleeing. But their boss was incapacitated, their mechanism destroyed, their prisoner freed. And there had been that moment when Lesley could have taken me.

"I'm about as sure as I can get, guv."

"Who's the ambulance for?" she demanded.

"Brooks. He, um, lost a fight with Inspector Nightingale."

"I don't think I've ever seen your boss fight anyone," said Stephanopoulos.

"Lucky you."

"It's all on its way," she said. "And I'll be along too."

Nightingale turned suddenly and looked at the canal. "Come out," he called sharply. "Now. Come here."

Somewhat to my surprise, Gus the Dog-boy pulled himself out of the water, gave himself a shake in a very doglike manner and came warily closer. He looked at Brooks. I'm not good at reading the expressions on chimeras' faces, but I thought I saw his tail give the slightest of wags.

"Contrary to popular belief," said Nightingale in that special dry voice he does sometimes, "I am not in the habit of simply shooting individuals in the head because it's more convenient. Do you surrender to us?"

Gus looked at Nightingale's face for a very long ten seconds, and then said in a rough, hoarse voice, "Yes."

"Good. Sit down. Peter-" He made a gesture to me and I went over. Gus sat down at Nightingale's word, exactly like a dog. I eyed him cautiously.

"I am arresting you for the murder of Pete Winning," I said. "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

"Court?" said Gus with what I could only describe as a bark of a laugh. "Are you serious?"

"I'm just doing my job." I didn't know whether I was serious or not. But that's how you arrest someone, and he was the number one murder suspect.

Given the huge amount of Olympic policing going on two hundred metres away, it didn't take long for backup to arrive. The ambulance was first, pulling up in a side road at the end of the alley. I went to direct them over, crossing my fingers that it wouldn't be anyone I knew. Fortunately, it wasn't, though the tubby white man who came first dragging a trolley gave me a look that made me think that word had got around in the LAS. They took charge of Brooks, and I made it clear that he was a seriously dangerous criminal.

"I don't think he'll be giving anyone any trouble for at least a few days," said the paramedic dryly. "What brought this on?"

I found that a hard question to answer. 'He overused magic' is the sort of statement that provokes more questions than it answers, and I didn't want to say 'resisting arrest' because that could end up with us in a world of trouble, even though stroke is not the standard sort of injury that people who 'resist arrest' get. Nightingale came to my rescue.

"He was attempting to escape," he said, "but I think the exertion was too much for him. He was on the path here, and Constable Grant and I were still on the boat when he collapsed."

I remembered the Pale Lady, who I couldn't possibly have killed, according to the inquiry, because I'd been six feet away from her when she'd fallen. The Department for Professional Standards really didn't take magic into consideration. The paramedic nodded, his expression relaxing slightly.

"And what about him?" He pointed at Gus. While we'd been waiting for the ambulance I'd gone back on the boat and found a blanket for him, in the best approved Met first-aid procedure for people who fall into canals, and although he'd laughed again and said he wasn't cold, he'd used it to cover his head and obscure his face, not to mention the tail.

"He's fine," I said. "Just a bit wet. He's under arrest for murder."

The paramedic took a step backwards. "Okay."

While he and his colleagues worked on loading Brooks up, Stephanopoulos arrived. With her were Guleed and Carey and a few other faces I dimly recognised from the James Gallagher case.

"Nothing's on fire," she said as she arrived. "Are you sure you're finished?"

I didn't say anything to that. Nightingale answered straightforwardly, "Yes, I believe we are. There's no further threat here. Though I'm afraid Lesley May and another practitioner escaped."

"Awa Shambir," I put in. "She was pretending to be a cleaner when I saw her before. I think she's a magical engineer."

"Yes, I thought you were going to propose to her at one point," said Nightingale dryly.

I spent some time giving descriptions of them both to Stephanopoulos, and telling her the short version of what had happened to us. Nightingale searched through the boat and pronounced it free of any magical dangers, and Stephanopoulos's team took charge of it as the scene of at least some of the crimes. The paramedics got Brooks onto a trolley and requested permission to take him to hospital.

Nightingale went over and gestured to Varvara, who had faded backwards again and was lurking a little way along the towpath. She returned, eyeing the police presence warily.

"I'd like you to accompany Brooks," said Nightingale to her. "Just in case he's less impaired than he looks. It needs to be someone who can detect if he attempts to use magic, and Peter has to stay here. But I expect you'd prefer to stay out of this part."

"If he attempts to use magic again it'll kill him," said Varvara with the conviction of someone who'd seen it happen.

"Nonetheless, if you please." It wasn't a request. I saw Varvara's back straighten a little at his tone. She'd been in the military too, and she responded to a command voice when she heard it. Stephanopoulos sent DC Carey with them as well to deal with more usual police matters, and they all headed off to the ambulance.

Gus, I noticed, relaxed considerably once Brooks and Varvara were both gone. Sahra Guleed went over to him curiously, and I saw the moment she saw his face and jerked back. He said something I couldn't hear, and she answered. Nightingale and I went over to them.

"I want you to escort him to the Folly and hand him over to Molly," Nightingale said to Guleed. "He won't give you any trouble."

"He won't," agreed Guleed with conviction. "Muslim ninja," she murmured to me. "This is one impressively weird case."

"You okay with him?" I asked. "I mean, the dog thing."

"So long as he doesn't start licking me. But he looks more like a person than a dog to me," she said. "You think he's the one who killed Pete Winning?"

"Sure of it. But... I also think he used to live in those cages we found."

Guleed's eyebrows shot up. "Right," she said. "You want me to be sensitive, do you?"

"I'm saying, I think he has a good case for saying he was coerced. Enslaved, even. No way out. It's Brooks who was responsible."

She nodded and beckoned to him, and Nightingale gave her a few instructions for what to tell Molly. Gus went with her meekly enough.

"That's going to be tricky to deal with," I observed.

"Yes," said Nightingale. "But it's what you want, isn't it?"

It was, and I didn't argue. Don't complain once you've won, that's a good rule. Stephanopoulos came back from examining the boat.

"Could have been worse, as prisons go," she said. "Very quiet in there."

Nightingale said nothing, and we began to run through all the paperwork. After a few minutes Nightingale left me to it and went to sit on a low wall looking out over the canal. Stephanopoulos frowned at him.

"Is he all right?" she asked gruffly.

"I think so. He always delegates this sort of stuff to me anyway."

"That's what junior officers are for," she agreed, but she glanced at Nightingale once more before returning to the paperwork and reports. Mostly it was a matter of deciding what to leave out. Brooks had kidnapped Nightingale by drugging him, held him prisoner in a boat and had been intending to use him and me as part of a plot to create an incident at the Olympic Games. That was a perfectly good story and had the virtue of being true. We could even include all the financial stuff, lots of nice juicy details there.

"But what was he planning to do?" she asked. "Apart from this stealing magic stuff, I mean."

"I think it was simple. And I think they were telling the truth about it being non-fatal, or mostly non-fatal. You remember that exploding cash register at J Sheekey's Oyster Bar? I think he was planning to do something like that, in multiple places simultaneously. Something he was going to plant that went off when exposed to strong magic. The strong magic to be provided by Nightingale. That's why they went off when Nightingale did a spell on the case they were in."

"Huh. You know, it's really fucking difficult to police things when you lot can turn a till into a bomb with a word."

"Sorry, boss."

She had no more idea what to do with Gus than I did. "I think we'll have to go with the story that it was a dog that killed the guy, some kind of rare breed or wolf cross or something. And you can hold him?"

"For now. I have no idea what we'll do in the long term."

Stephanopoulos frowned thoughtfully. "Yeah. You reckon he was a sex slave, before?"

"Almost certainly. And he would have been, well, normal-looking once. Brooks turned him into that."

"Can your boss turn him back again?"

"Dunno. It's not his thing. Brooks might have been able to, but not any more."

"Well, that's your problem." Stephanopoulos didn't quite brush her hands together, but she looked like she wanted to. "All right. I think that's all we need to do here tonight. You and your boss can go; we'll see you tomorrow if you're up to it." Her tone made it clear that she expected me at least to be up to it.

The boat was sealed off and left with a constable guarding it, and I looked back at Nightingale. He was still sitting on the low wall on the edge of the river. I wondered whether I should have made the paramedics check him over a bit more thoroughly. They had bandaged up his hands and mine before leaving, at least.

"Sir?"

He looked up.

"You need to go to hospital?"

"I don't think so," he said. "I'm just still a bit stiff. And-" he looked around the wide space, "it's quite pleasant to be out here now."

After only a few hours in the cell, I still understood exactly what he meant. "All right." I sat down beside him on the wall. "So, what now?"

"I believe there's a large party happening just around the corner," Nightingale said. "Shall we?"

I grinned. "Why not?"

We got up and headed down the path towards the Olympic Park, and I matched Nightingale's slow pace. "I was at the other London Games," he remarked unexpectedly. "1908 and 1948 both. Though I don't remember much of '48. I was just a child in '08, but I remember more of it. The White City Stadium was wonderful." He looked up at the bulk of the new stadium now looming up on our right. "This one's very fine too, I'm sure," he added.

It wasn't hard to blag our way past the police on the gates - Stephanopoulos had found both our warrant cards on the boat and returned them to us - and we struggled through the crowds. There was no chance of actually getting inside the stadium, but I found us a space to sit on the edge of a crowd watching the ceremony on one of the big screens. They were still warming up, so I pulled out my phone again and called Walid.

"He's safe," I said. "I have him here with me."

Walid muttered something I didn't catch, then louder, "Allah be praised." I'd never heard him say anything like that before.

"I have a suspect coming your way," I added. "Edward Brooks. I think he's the one who did a lot of the biological work on the chimeras." Beside me I heard Nightingale mutter, "Chimerae," and I gave a theatrical sigh and repeated into the phone, "Chimerae. Anyway, he's had a stroke or something, he's coming in by ambulance with a police escort, and Varvara as well to make sure he's not shamming, but I don't think he is. And I have a new chimera for you too, on his way to the Folly. Gus the Dog-boy. He murdered Pete Winning, under coercion; he's surrendered to us now. Who knows, maybe he'll turn out to be your expert on animal magic."

Walid laughed. "Yeah, that'll be the day. All right, I'll check them both out. And what about himself? Does he need to come in?"

"He says not. We're watching the opening ceremony in the Olympic Park now."

"Of course you are. Pass me over to him, please."

I gave the phone to Nightingale. There was a little smile on his lips as he answered a series of questions about his health. "Peter's already fussing enough for six people," Nightingale concluded. "You don't need to worry about me."

"I'm not fussing," I protested for the look of it, as Nightingale finished reassuring Walid. He kept hold of my mobile and stabbed at the touchscreen with surprising competence. "Hello, Molly," he said.

"Oh, good idea," I said. "She was very upset."

He nodded and said into the phone, "Peter found me. I'm perfectly fine, there's no need to worry. We'll be home later on."

"Want something to eat?" I said when he'd finished and given the phone back to me.

"As I said. Fussing enough for six," Nightingale replied, but he didn't argue when I got up and went to explore the various food stalls. I may have curtailed my choice based on the ones I could queue at and still see Nightingale out of the corner of my eye. After all that trouble, I didn't want to lose him again.

I came back with a couple of tandoori lamb burgers, crisps and two bottles of Carlsburg, which was all anyone seemed to be selling. There was a murmur around the crowd, and the big screen started to show something other than the BBC presenters warming up. We settled down to watch.

"That _has_ to have been arranged by Lady Ty," I said. "And Oxley." The screen was showing a tribute to the River Thames, from the source to the Thames Barrier, and it had the distinction between the two halves of the river perfectly: English country pubs, picturesque fields and cricket, and then suddenly the great city in all her glory.

"Very probable," said Nightingale. "I know Lady Ty was involved in the bid."

And then the ceremony began. I watched with fascinated appreciation, Nightingale with perplexed fascination. The start with the Ye Olde English pastoral scene made Nightingale smile, then frown when it was abruptly demolished by men in stovepipe hats and superb muttonchops, and replaced by workmen, forges and smokestacks, and the future.

"Yes," he said quietly, "it was rather like that," and I realised that he'd witnessed at least half of this history. "They tore down the old world and threw up a new one in its place." The camera zoomed in on the model of Glastonbury Tor, and Nightingale smiled. "But the magic remained."

I didn't suppose that was really what the organisers of the opening ceremony had in mind for that symbolism, but it fit, so I nodded.

Once the historical bits were over it was a tour of London cultural references from the past fifty years or so. And Nightingale, despite living in London the whole time, had managed to miss almost all of them. I had to explain practically everything. He did at least know John Lennon and Chariots of Fire, but Mr Bean completely baffled him, and he didn't get any of the East Enders jokes either. I gave up on explaining when we started the whistle-stop tour of British music, and by the time Dizzee Rascal came on, I realised Nightingale was dozing off. I was pretty cream crackered too, so I didn't do anything even when he finally fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. It had been a weird week anyway, I didn't think this could make it weirder.

But when the athletes started parading I started to get bored and a bit chilly, so I shook Nightingale awake. He turned his head and blinked up, and I clearly saw the moment when he realised where he was, and more importantly where he wasn't.

"Peter," he said sleepily.

I smiled, just a bit. "Come on, sir," I said. "Let's go home."


End file.
